Rachel Jamison Webster grew up in Madison, Ohio, on the banks of Lake Erie, and now lives near Lake Michigan, in Evanston, Illinois, with her husband and daughter. In addition to Benjamin Banneker and Us, Rachel has published four books of poetry of hybrid forms—Mary is a River, which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series; September; The Endless Unbegun; and The Sea Came Up & Drowned, which includes erasure poetry and Rachel’s visual art. Rachel’s poems and essays often appear in anthologies and journals, including Poetry, Lit Hub, and The Yale Review.

Rachel has taught at Northwestern University since 2005. She has received a Weinberg College Alumni Teaching Award and a Hewlett Fellowship for her creation of diversity and social inequities curriculum, and has been a Fellow in the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, an Op-Ed Public Voices Fellow, and a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society. Before she taught at the college level, Rachel designed and taught writing workshops for city teens through the Urban League in Portland, Oregon, and Gallery 37 in Chicago. She helped develop paid after-school arts programs with Chicago’s First Lady, Maggie Daley, and co-edited two anthologies of writing by young Chicagoans, Alchemy (2001) and Paper Atrium (2005).

Rachel is inspired by the symbiosis that happens between reading, teaching, and writing, and she loves creating spaces for others to share their stories. For more on her teaching philosophy, and to access prompts and inspiration for creative writing, please visit her teaching site, Meditative Creative Writing.