Rebecca Macijeski
Rebecca Macijeski holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a BA in English and Music from Simmons College (now Simmons University). She has attended artist residencies with The Ragdale Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Art Farm Nebraska. She's worked for Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column, worked as an Assistant Editor in Poetry for the literary journals Prairie Schooner and Hunger Mountain, and is the recipient of a 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. In 2016 she attended the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching at Robert Frost’s former home in Franconia, NH. She has also offered collaborative workshops at the National Association for Poetry Therapy Conference in Kansas City and Denver. Her chapbook and full-length poetry manuscripts have placed in contests with Comstock Review, Four Way Books, and YesYes Books. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Conduit, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, Fairy Tale Review, Puerto del Sol, and many others. She is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing Programs at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana.
Rebecca has a new chapbook, Apocryphal Girl, coming out with Pinhole Poetry in 2024. Stay tuned for updates.
Rebecca's chapbook, Autobiography, is out now from Split Rock Press.
Praise for Autobiography:
The unlikely star of Rebecca Macijeski’s Autobiography is the speaker’s brain—which appears as a vegetable garden, a stenographer’s report, an old man in sensible shoes, and in a myriad of other guises. Ultimately, this highly inventive series of poems is an exploration of identity and imagination. It turns the sealed stone of the reader’s own brain into a disco of things coming alive.
--Grace Bauer, author of Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems
In her first line of this fine chapbook Rebecca Macijeski claims “my brain is a quiet room I enter every morning” but luckily for us that room becomes a profound musicality that her “brain” gives us, in precise and original “metaphors she makes every day.” Page after page, these are the kind of lyric poems your own brain and particularly your own heart will be long hesitant to let go. They are still holding on to mine.
--Sean Thomas Dougherty
Macijeski’s poems are an act of stunning and recursive world-making in which the interiority of the mind becomes the imaginative pulse of our perspectives, our politics, and the very nature of human subjectivity. With eccentric force and dynamic metaphorical movement, Autobiography is a collection you will not want to put down—its playful elegance drawing you in for more metaphor, more self, more vision of a world made new.
--Stacey Waite
photo by Oona Zbitkovskis