| Intro | Canadian writer |
| Is | Poet |
| From | Canada |
| Type | Literature |
| Gender | female |
| Birth | 20 September 1970, Vancouver, Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada |
| Age: | 49 years |
Rachel Rose (born September 20, 1970) is a Canadian/American poet, essayist and short story writer. She has published three collections of poetry, Giving My Body to Science, Notes on Arrival and Departure, and Song and Spectacle. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada and the United States.
In 2011, Rachel and composer Leslie Uyeda were commissioned by the Queer Arts Festival in Vancouver to write the libretto for Canada’s first lesbian opera, When The Sun Comes Out, which premiered in August 2013 in Vancouver and in Toronto in June 2014.
In 2014, Rachel was named Vancouver’s Poet Laureate, for a term running through to 2017.
Personal life
She grew up on Hornby Island (British Columbia), and in Vancouver, Anacortes and Seattle. In the mid-1990s, Rachel lived and worked in Japan for a year. She has worked as a medical secretary, ESL teacher, and as the poetry mentor in The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. In 2015 she was a resident in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
Awards and prizes
- 1997 – winner, Bronwen Wallace Award for fiction
- 2000 – finalist, Pat Lowther Memorial Award for poetry
- 2000 – finalist, Gerald Lampert Award for poetry
- 2000 – finalist, Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal for poetry
- 2000 – winner, Quebec Writers Federation A.M. Klein Award (Giving My Body to Science)
- 2013 – winner, Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry (Song and Spectacle)
- 2013 – winner, Pat Lowther Memorial Award for poetry