Robin Beth Schaer
Photo by Anthony Tognazzini
Bio
Robin Beth Schaer is the author of the poetry collection Shipbreaking (Anhinga 2015). Her poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, Bomb Magazine, Paris Review, and Guernica, among others.
Her honors include an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2020 and fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Saltonstall Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She holds degrees from Colgate University and Columbia University. Born and raised in New York, she now lives in Ohio with her husband, the writer Anthony Tognazzini, and their son. She is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College.
My current project is a series of poems that explore consciousness and empathy across deep time, on both interstellar and intimate scales—from supernovas and ice ages to motherhood and love. The poems reckon with environmental decline, mass extinction, and mounting social crises. Among this work is a complex long poem that braids together many elements, including the history of the color blue, the Holocaust, mysticism, Ancient Egyptian art, and a long-lost sea creature.
A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts is profoundly meaningful because the publicly funded support represents the vital role of the arts in our national life. I accept this fellowship with a belief in the mutual responsibility between artists and communities to sustain one another. My writing is driven by the conviction that contemplation is an act of compassion, and literature has the power to shape ideas, create empathy, and build a just and more humane world. Poems not only reflect the way we live, they can be agents of healing, revelation, and reckoning. By seeking intersections between science, history, and spirituality, I hope my poems illuminate radical hope, and I am immensely grateful to the NEA for the opportunity to realize this work.