Patricia Traxler

Award-winning poet and fiction writer Patricia Traxler is the author of three collections of poetry, Forbidden Words (University of Missouri), The Glass Woman (Hanging Loose Press), Blood Calendar (William Morrow), and a novel, Blood (St. Martins Press), which was also published in an Irish/​UK edition (Piatkus Press), and in Spanish, Swedish, and German translations.

A two-time Bunting Poetry Fellow at Radcliffe, Traxler also served as Hugo Poet at the University of Montana and Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State. She has lectured, read, or served as visiting writer at many other US universities, including the University of California, San Diego; Emerson College, Boston; Old Dominion University, Virginia; Westminster College, Salt Lake City; San Diego State University; Utah State University; and Kansas University, Lawrence.

Traxler was born and raised in San Diego, California, one of eight children in a working-class Irish-Catholic family. She was much influenced by her maternal grandmother, Nora Dunne, a poet from County Cork, Ireland, who lived with the family for several years during Traxler’s childhood. “I often saw Gran working on her poetry in a green clothbound ledger, and heard her around the house reciting poems like ‘Thanatopsis’ or ‘To a Skylark,’ just for the delight she took in them," Traxler says, "so poetry just seemed an ordinary and essential part of life to me.”

In addition to her own writing, Traxler has published two personal history anthologies: Vintage (Smoky Hill River Press), a collection of first-person reminiscences ranging back in time to the first World War, and In Our Time (Smoky Hill River Press), which collects the memories of people who came of age on the Great Plains during the years from 1910 to 1975.

“Some of my most rewarding teaching experiences have come outside the world of academe, working with the elderly and with special needs groups,” Traxler says. She has developed writing programs and projects for the deaf and hearing-impaired, for cancer patients, for homeless women and victims of domestic violence, and for mental health and stroke patients. “All of these experiences have been of great value to me,” she says, "in particular for what they've taught me about the endless possibilities and complexities of human connection."

Traxler is a past recipient of Ploughshares' Cohen Award; Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Award; The Writer's Voice of New York City Open Voice Award for Short Fiction; the Hackney Literary Award for Short Fiction; Radcliffe’s Presidential Discretionary Award; a Kansas Literary Fellowship; 1994 and '99 Poetry Society of America Writers Magazine/​Emily Dickinson Award honors; the Alice Carter Award for Poetry from Kansas University; and the Georgia State University Award for Short Fiction. She is also a past Grand Prize winner of the International Imitation Hemingway Competition.

Her poetry and fiction have appeared in many publications, including The Nation, Slate, Agni, The Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, Ms. Magazine, Hanging Loose, Tikkun, Glimmer Train, The American Voice, The Los Angeles Times Literary Supplement, The San Francisco Chronicle, and New Letters, as well as in a number of anthologies, including Best American Poetry (A.R. Ammons, ed.); A Handbook of Heartbreak (Robert Pinsky, ed.); A Ring of Words (Andrew Motion, ed.); Tangled Vines (L.Lifshin, ed.); e: the Emily Dickinson Award Anthology (Universities West); The Best of Bad Hemingway: Award Anthology (Harcourt); and special mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology for her 7-poem sequence, "Finitudes," which originally appeared in New Letters.

Traxler’s essays have appeared in Newsweek, The Daily Beast, and the anthologies Night Errands: How Poets Use Dreams (University of Pittsburgh Press), and Grandmothers: Granddaughters Remember (Syracuse University Press). She has just completed work on her second novel, The Hunger Season, and is at work on her fourth poetry collection, The Fires.

Literary Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt and Hochman Literary Agents, 1501 Broadway, New York, NY 10036