Photo credit: Éric Fontaine

About

Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren was born and raised in Cleveland. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, she was a member of the creative writing subconcentration for poetry, and spent a semester studying visual art and history in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. She went on to earn her MFA in poetry and literary translation from Columbia University. With the support of a Fulbright Fellowship, she then spent nine months in Rio de Janeiro, translating contemporary Brazilian poetry with a strong sense of place and writing a literary travel column for Words Without Borders.

Rachel’s honors include a Hopwood Award, an Academy of American Poets prize, The Michigan Quarterly Review’s Paige Davidson Clayton Award for Emerging Poets, and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. Her poems, interviews, essays, and translations appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Common, Poetry Northwest, Guernica, Narrative, Off Assignment, Lilith, Best New Poets, and elsewhere.

Rachel was the Blog Editor for Words Without Borders and a Senior Editor for Joyland Magazine. She works as a writer, editor, and translator, and lives with her family in Montreal.