Rachel Zucker is the author of ten books including The Poetics of Wrongness (Wave Books, 2023), SoundMachine (Wave Books, 2019), The Pedestrians (Wave Books, 2014), and Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (For all of her books, go to the Books page). Zucker is the founder and host of the podcast Commonplace, and the Directrix of the Commonplace School for Embodied Poetics.
A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Zucker has taught creative writing to people of all ages inside and outside the academy for 29 years. She has taught at Columbia, Yale, The Antioch Low Residency Program, Basic Trust Daycare, Friends Seminary K-12, The 92nd Street Y, and many other places. For the past 15 years, Zucker has been an adjunct professor at NYU (protected by the ACT-UAW 7902 Union) where she has taught poetry to graduate and undergraduate students.
In 2016 she was a Bagley Wright Lecturer and wrote and delivered a series of talks on poetry, photography, confessionalism, motherhood, and the ethics of representing real people in art. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 2012, a Sustainable Arts Fellowship in 2016, and residencies from The MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center in 2018. Zucker is mother to three sons and lives in Washington Heights, NY and Scarborough, ME.
