Rachel Dillon
Rachel Dillon is a poet, teacher, and editor from Arlington, Massachusetts. She holds a BA in creative writing, an MAT in secondary English education from Brandeis University, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.
Dillon has published work in Poet Lore, Verse Daily, Asheville Poetry Review, and in the anthology Driven to Write: 45 Writers on the Motives and Mysteries of Their Craft (Routledge, 2025), edited by Ellen Pinsky and Michael Slevin.
Dillon was awarded the inaugural Susan Kamil Emerging Writers Prize from the Book Industry Charitable (BINC) Foundation in 2024 for her poetry collection in progress, which explores the history and landscape of Gloucester, Massachusetts. A 2024 Best of the Net nominee, she was a finalist for the 2024 Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition and Solstice Literary Magazine’s 2023 Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. She has also received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship from Boston University. In 2025, she won first place for the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize. About her first-place winning poem, judges J. Drew Lanham and Dr. T. Jane Zelikova wrote the following:
“A dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem” lives within the irony of both deep demise and the illumination of the forever ephemeral. The couplets are waves, or soundings; the words precise but unsure. The certainty of this poem draws one down to the depths of fate and the necessity of endings for beginnings. Nothing dies in this poem. It asks us to be brave for what is to come. Especially now, bravery is what is needed, even if we have to pretend and hope that bravery is what follows. Our hands, so industrious and yet ruinous for so many species with which we share this planet, are called to action at the end of the poem. Our hands are needed to repair what has been broken and to hold close what we cherish.
A former high school English teacher in New York City’s public schools, Dillon is the managing editor of Ploughshares. She lives in Boston.