Margaret Rabb
After
teaching for six years in the Creative Writing program at the
University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, her hometown, Margaret
Rabb realized that working with energetic, dynamic student writers had
become her vocation and joy. In response, she has spent the last two
years in the MFA program at the University of Washington in Seattle,
studying, writing and teaching.
Rabb is
a working poet who pays close attention to the transformative
possibilities of form when cast in a contemporary voice, and enjoys
working with writers who are interested in learning how they can have
at their disposal such techniques as meter and traditional sound
patterns, ready to resist or integrate into their own voices.
Her own
intellectual interests lie in the relationship between etymology,
metaphor and imaginative vision. She has pursued her fascination with
the earliest texts in English, studying Old English, translating
Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, and integrating them into her poetry. In
addition, she is currently developing a multi-genre project about
Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth century mystic who wrote the oldest
text in English by a woman that has survived to our time.
In 2006 Coleman Barks chose Margaret Rabb’s poems for the initial Rumi Prize from Arts & Letters journal. Her first book of poems, Granite Dives
(published by New Issues Press at Western Michigan University in 2000),
was a National Poetry Series finalist and received North Carolina’s
Roanoke Chowan Award. Fred Chappell wrote about her new chapbook of
Carolina poems, set for publication this fall by New American Press, “Old Home
mingles wry humor, dark wit, and deep sorrow in almost equal measures
to produce a poetry that is strong and taut as a bowstring drawn to the
archer’s ear.”
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