Robin Becker is the author of eight previous books of poetry: The Black Bear Inside Me, Tiger Heron, Domain of Perfect Affection, The Horse Fair, All-American Girl, Giacometti’s Dog, Backtalk, and Personal Effects. All-American Girl received the Lambda Literary Award and was an Academy of American Poets Poetry Book Club Selection. A Visiting Artist Residency at the Frick Art and Historical Museum in Pittsburgh resulted in the publication of Venetian Blue, a limited-edition chapbook of ekphrastic poems. Her awards and honors include a Massachusetts Artist Foundation Fellowship in Poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Prairie Schooner Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing, a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Visiting Scholarship from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York. 

Becker’s poems and books reviews have appeared in dozens of publications, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry, Ploughshares, Slate, and The Writer’s Chronicle.Textbook authors have selected her poems for The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature, Poetry: An Introduction, and Serious Daring: Creative Writing in Four Genres. Among the diverse anthologies in which her work appears are The Body Electric: America’s Best Poetry from the American Poetry Review, The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, The Pittsburgh Book of Contemporary American Poetry, Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, and Urban Nature: Poems About Wildlife in the City.  For almost two decades, Becker served as poetry editor of The Women’s Review of Books and wrote a regular column on contemporary poetry called Field Notes. Becker is liberal arts research professor emerita of English and women’s studies at Penn State University and is a recipient of the university’s George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching. While at Penn State, Becker pioneered a graduate seminar in literary book reviewing that launched a cohort of young critics focused on independent publishers. She lives in central Pennsylvania and rural New Hampshire.