BIO
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Rachel Prizant Kotok grew up in rural South Jersey. Both sides of her family have agrarian refugee roots. She is a fifth-generation descendant of a unique Jewish Ukrainian farming community, established in 1882 during the zenith of pogroms under the Russian Empire. In the late 1940s, nearly a thousand Holocaust survivors sought refuge in her hometown. With support, many refugee chicken farmers proliferated in the region.
Rachel attended Smith College, earning her BA in World Religion. At the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, she completed an MA in TESOL and ELL public school licensure, with a focus on language and literacy development, linguistics, intercultural communication, and innovative curriculum design.
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An educator for more than two decades, Rachel has taught university students at UC Berkeley, California State University-East Bay, and San Francisco Bay Area colleges. She has instructed newcomer elementary, middle school, and adult learners in refugee communities—San Francisco, Boston, and Portland, Maine. She has worked abroad in Chile, Perú, Guatemala, México, and Israel/Palestine.
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Addicted to constrained writing, Rachel writes letter-sequenced palindromic poetry, microfiction, flash, and fiction. She was a finalist for Southwest Review’s Morton Marr Poetry Prize and the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Tiferet Journal, Star 82 Review, Hey I’m Alive Magazine, The Centifictionist, Wend Poetry, Digital Paper, and elsewhere.
BACKSTORY
As a young child, I was an early and avid reader. Books were friends, characters became alive, and I reveled in experimenting with an array of voices. At seven or eight years old, I began to write illustrated books and recorded them on tape cassettes, spending hours to create, pause, fast forward, play, stop, and rewind. How I loved that old school technology!
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There’s one surviving audio and illustrated book from my childhood. My dear friend and I collaborated, differentiating voices for the multiple characters in the book. The high-pitched tone is my voice.
In fourth grade, we studied poetry. I was hooked when I encountered an ancestor’s poetry book published in 1930. My ancestor identified as a wanderer, poet, and philosopher. We shared the same palindromic family name, and I was thrilled to have a poet in the family.
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I wanted to follow in his footsteps. I studied the patterned rhyming structure and attempted to emulate a poem like his. After writing my first piece, I decided to be a secret poet.
