Beth Bachmann

Beth Bachmann was born and raised near Philadelphia, where her father, a non-combat veteran, worked as a shoe-shiner and locker-room attendant. She studied at Loyola University of Maryland, the Johns Hopkins University, and Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Temper (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), Do Not Rise (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), and CEASE (2018). Temper, about her sister’s unsolved murder, won AWP's Donald Hall Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Do Not Rise was the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, explores war, memory and post-traumatic stress. CEASE, winner of the Virginia Quarterly Review's Emily Clark Balch Prize (2018), explores peace as a process and transient state.

Bachmann's work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, Tin House, World Literature Today online, and NPR’S On Being blog. She is the recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim fellowship. Each fall, she serves as writer in residence in the MFA program at Vanderbilt University and divides the rest of her time between Nashville and New York City.