Robyn Schiff

Poet Robyn Schiff was born in New Jersey. She earned an MFA at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA at the University of Bristol. She is the author of the poetry collections A Woman of Property (2016), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and named a best book of the year by the New Yorker and the Chicago Tribune, and an New York Times editor’s choice; Revolver (2008), a finalist for the PEN Award, and Worth (2002). Her work has been featured in several anthologies, including Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (2007) and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006).
 
Poet and critic Stephanie Burt has described Schiff’s poems as “well made and uncommonly elaborate.” Her work frequently treats objects and historical figures in virtuosic lyric detail. In an interview with the Poetry Society of America, Schiff stated, “more so than a specific practice in one of the other arts, curation as an art form in itself has most informed me. Of course at museums I’m moved by so many individual works—but it’s the crosstalk between seemingly disparate objects that really inspires me.”
 
Schiff’s honors include an award from the Academy of American Poets Greenwall Fund and inclusion in the Poetry Society of America’s 2007 Festival of New American Poets. In 2021, Schiff completed a fellowship at MacDowell where she worked on her book-length poem “Information Desk: An Epic,” about her experiences as a staff member at the info desk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, forthcoming from Penguin in 2022. Excerpts from the poem have been published by the New Yorker, Yale Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the coeditor of Canarium Books, an independent poetry press, and coeditor of the literary journal The Canary.

Schiff is a professor at Emory University and lives with her husband, poet, and filmmaker Nick Twemlow, in Atlanta.