Rosebud Ben-Oni · portrait
Rosebud Ben-Oni
BASED IN
Queens, NYCU.S. / Northeast
THEMES
Science and Art
LANGUAGES
English
BOOKS
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LONG BIO

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including the forthcoming The Last Great Adventure is You (Alice James Books, 2027),_ _a sequel to 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. 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. 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. She performed at Carnegie Hall on International Holocaust Memorial Day, as part “We Are Here: Songs From The Holocaust.” Her poem “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” was featured in Tracy K. Smith’s _The Slowdown. _ 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. 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.

SHORT BIO

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including the forthcoming _The Last Great Adventure is You (Alice James Books, 2027), _a sequel to _If This is the Age We End Discovery _(2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her work has been commissioned by Paramount, the National September 11th Memorial, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. She has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Queens Arts Fund, Cafe Royal Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts and CantoMundo. Her work appears in _POETRY, APR, The Writer's Chronicle, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Tin House, _among others.

RHINO Poetry
Electric Literature
Publishers Weekly
Caesura
Entropy
Latino Stories
The Rumpus
Harvard Review
Woman's Day
Tupelo Quarterly
Writers & Books
EcoTheo Review
Shining Rock Poetry
Jewish Book Council
The Rupture
Poetry Foundation (Harriet)
Ben-Oni doesn't ask us to believe in the relationship between monsters and love, she forces us to know it.
Queen Mob's Teahouse
Tupelo Quarterly
Booklist
Electric Literature
She exists as golem, as wild beast, as Axolotl. She burns; she roars... The highs in the collection are moonshots.
RHINO Poetry
Structo Magazine
The Millions
Poetry Northwest
On the Seawall
Ben-Oni's poems are ecstatically and unabashedly feminist, queer, punk, Latinx, and Jewish, making hers a unique and vital voice for our times.
Chicago Review of Books
The Latinx Project
The Rumpus
The Wise Owl
The propulsion and scope of Ben-Oni's poems give each word an exhilarating amount of power.
Jewish Currents
READINGS & LECTURE TOPICS
  • Potential for human connection in the face of war (particularly nuclear war) and existential uncertainty
  • Aftermath of sexual assault and violence (no graphic content)
  • Survival and psychological effects of disaster
  • Concealment; nullification; transformation
  • Horses (particular the Icelandic horse)
  • Foreignness/Other
  • Judaism
  • Queerness
  • Imagination
  • Self discovery
  • Family, memory and heartbreak; grief
  • Illness; recovery; death; the soul; the body
  • Science; planets and stars; The Absurd; ethics; ethics of science and consequences of scientific progress; string theory, quantum entanglement and decoherence; redemption and transformation; Discovery; turning away from the light; scientists; experiments; creation, dark matter; gravity; equations; limits of human understanding in the face of the unknown; exploration and the responsibilities that come with it; being wrong; versions of different outcomes for the future; extraterrestrials, exploration of alien life and the struggles of first contact
SERVICES OFFERED
  • Artist talks
  • Workshops
  • Live poetry performances
  • Keynote speeches
  • Panel discussions
  • Class visits
  • Commissioned writing
MEDIA
Video

The Museum commissioned this special poem by acclaimed poet Rosebud Ben-Oni to honor the lifecycle of Andy Goldsworthy’s Garden of Stones. Here, Ben-Oni reflects on her experience of the Garden of Stones, and of writing the poem, When You Are the Arrow of Time.

Rosebud Ben-Oni
POETS WHO PAIR WELL ON A BILL WITH ROSEBUD
Chrysanthemum Tran
Ariana Brown
Raina J. León
Cynthia Dewi Oka