Chapman, Robin

Robin Chapman is author of six books of poetry, including a collaboration with the fractals images and explanations of physicist J.C. Sprott in Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos,  winner of the Posner Poetry Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers; The Dreamer Who Counted the Dead, winner of an Outstanding Book Award from the Wisconsin Library Association; Smoke and Strong Whiskey, poems of the Canadian Rockies in winter; and, most recently, Abundance, poems of the Wisconsin landscape and winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Book Award. A seventh book is forthcoming from TebotBach in September, The Eelgrass Meadow, poems of the natural world.

Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Scholar, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Hudson Review, and Prairie Schooner among many other publications; on jazz CDs, as the lyrics of solo and choral works by Canadian and US composers, in lights above the African cichlids and in ceramics by the giraffes at the Milwaukee County Zoo, and in a 65 foot mosaic mural of the Everglades made by Everglades High School students in Florida.  A recipient of the 2010 Helen Howe Poetry Prize from Appalachia, she has also co-edited the collections On Retirement: 75 Poems (University of Iowa Press) and Love Over 60: an anthology of women’s poems (Mayapple Press) and served as an editor for Fireweed Press. She teaches a week-long poetry workshop at The Clearing in Door Country every May and lives in Madison with her accordion-playing husband Will Zarwell.