Robin Becker

Robin Becker was born in 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned a BA and MA from Boston University and taught for seventeen years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Becker is the author of The Black Bear Inside Me (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018); Tiger Heron (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014); Domain of Perfect Affection (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); The Horse Fair (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); All-American Girl (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), which won the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry; Giacometti’s Dog (1990); Backtalk (Alice James Books, 1982); and Personal Effects (Alice James Books, 1977).

About Becker’s work, Stephen Dunn has said:

Robin Becker achieves what may be one of the early twenty-first century’s most difficult accomplishments—to write a credible poetry of affirmation. In the doing, she doesn’t pretty up the world. Rather, she finds language that embraces our dualities, our many-selved presences, regularly demonstrating her kind of perfect affection.

Becker’s poems and book reviews have appeared in publications such as American Poetry Review, the Boston Globe, Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. Her honors include the 1997 Virginia Faulkner Prize for Excellence in Writing from Prairie Schooner magazine and fellowships from the Mary Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In addition to serving as poetry editor for The Women’s Review of Books, Becker writes a column for the WRB on poetry and the poetry scene called “Field Notes.” She is a professor of English and women’s studies at Pennsylvania State University.