Rachel Wetzsteon

Born on November 25, 1967 in New York City, Rachel Wetzsteon studied at Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and received her PhD from Columbia University.

She is the author of three collections of poems, including Sakura Park (Persea, 2006), Home and Away (Penguin, 1998), and The Other Stars (1994), which was selected by John Hollander for the 1993 National Poetry Series. Her poetry was also informed by her critical writing, including a book on W. H. Auden, titled Influential Ghosts: A Study of Auden's Sources (Routledge Press, 2007).

About her work, the poet David Yezzi writes:

For all of Wetzsteon's prosodic and emotional control, her poems never lack for red corpuscles. Far from damping emotion, her measured lines intensify it through the coiled anxiety and longing seamlessly controlled in them.

Wetzsteon received an Ingram Merrill grant and the 2001 Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She taught at William Paterson University and the Unterberg Poetry Center of the Ninety-Second Street Y.

She lived in Manhattan, New York, where she also served as poetry editor for the New Republic. Rachel Wetzsteon died on December 25, 2009.