Winner of the 2019 Alice James Award
Rosebud Ben-Oni 2021.JPG

Bio

BIO

 

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including If This is the Age We End Discovery (Alice James Books, 2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. In May 2022, Paramount commissioned her video essay “My Judaism is a Wild Unplace" for a national campaign for Jewish Heritage Month, which appeared on Paramount Network, MTV Networks, The Smithsonian Channel, VH1 and many others. Her poem "Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark" was commissioned by the National September 11th Memorial & Museum in NYC, and her poem “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” was featured in Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown. In January 2023, she performed at Carnegie Hall on International Holocaust Memorial Day, as part “We Are Here: Songs From The Holocaust.” In January 2024, her poem “When You Are the Arrow of Time” was commissioned and filmed by the Museum of Jewish Heritage— A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in NYC.

In 2023, she received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant to write The Atomic Sonnets, a full length poetry collection based on her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020), which she began in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday in 2019. She is also a receipent of a 2021 City Arts Corps grant, a 2021 Queens Arts Fund grant from the Queens Council for the Arts, a 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a 2013 CantoMundo Fellow. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America (PSA), The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Wales, Poetry Daily, Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ecotone, The Missouri Review, The Journal, Hunger Mountain, The Adroit Journal, The Southeast Review, Poetry Northwest, Arts & Letters, North American Review, among others. She lives in NYC, and teaches poetry workshops at UCLA Writers’ Program; from 2015-2020, she wrote weekly for The Kenyon Review blog.

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Ben-Oni has collaborated with various arts, science and media organizations including the 2022 Readings Series, All of the Sky: Five Poets, Five Saturdays, one of five poets selected for the series in connection with the group exhibition 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone. Recent projects include taking part in the OSU’s Dwelling Project, a collaboration between poets and scientists, working with evolutionary biologist Dr. Zakee Sabree, which culminated in her poem “Tagging Maligned Insects, which was published in Magma (UK). Colombian Artists Juliana Call Paternina and Catalina Bolivar created textiles from poems in her latest collection, If This Is the Age We End Discovery, as part of THREADS BOGOTA, curated by Alejandra Fonseca of Maleza Proyectos and organized by Ged Merino and Olena Jennings, with exhibitions in Colombia and in the U.S including the Flux Factory. She is part of the QUEENSBOUND project, and took part in The Onassis Foundation’s ENTER exhibition.