BIO

Robin Beth Schaer was born and raised in New York. She received a B.A. in Religion from Colgate University and an M.F.A. in Writing from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Her first book of poetry, Shipbreaking, received the Robert Dana-Anhinga Poetry Prize and was published in August 2015 by Anhinga Press. A Spanish translation of the collection is was published in 2024 by Komorebi Ediciones. Shipbreaking was named one of BuzzFeed’s “Best Poetry Books” and “Best Literary Debuts” of 2015. The starred review for Shipbreaking in Publishers Weekly declared: "In Schaer’s voluminous, shipwrecked world, everything is beautiful and no one is safe. This is a gorgeous debut from a smart, incisive young poet.”

Schaer is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from The National Endowment for the Arts in 2021 and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2020. Her current project, a collection of essays and poems about the relationship between art and atrocity, was included on the Creative Capital 2022 Shortlist and was awarded research grants from Oberlin College and the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities for travel to Poland and Germany. Schaer has received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Hillholm Writers Residency, Saltonstall Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Bomb Magazine, Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, Washington Square, and Guernica, among others.

For five years, she worked at the Academy of American Poets, directing the online programs, editing and writing features for Poets.org, and curating events. Her work included developing materials, resources, and lesson plans for teaching poetry in public schools and observing of National Poetry Month.

She has performed readings and led panels throughout the country, including recent appearances at Literary Cleveland, Litquake San Francisco, Brooklyn Book Festival, Texas Book Festival, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, The Loft’s Wordplay Festival, and the AWP Conference.

For over a decade, she has taught writing in colleges, community art centers, middle schools, high schools, and museums. She has taught classes in all genres of creative writing and often teaches environmental writing, poetic and hybrid forms, lyric essays, queer poetics, and contemporary long poems. Her recent work includes positions at Columbia University, Case Western Reserve University, Oberlin College, Marymount Manhattan College, Cooper Union, The New School, and the College of Wooster. During the summers of 2009 and 2010, she worked as a deckhand aboard the Tall Ship Bounty, a 180-foot full-rigged ship lost in Hurricane Sandy in 2012. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her family.