Judith Baumel

Judith Baumel is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Radcliffe College, Harvard University, and Johns Hopkins University. She was also a Fulbright Scholar in Italy.

Baumel is the author of five poetry collections: Thorny (Arrowsmith Press, 2022); Passeggiate (Arrowsmith Press, 2019); The Kangaroo Girl (GenPop Books, 2011); Now (Miami University Press, 1995); and The Weight of Numbers (Wesleyan University Press, 1988), for which she won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Baumer’s work is also represented in a number of anthologies, including The First 50 Years: A Jubilee in Prose and Poetry Honoring Women Rabbis (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023), edited by Hara E. Person, Jessica Greenbaum, and Sue Levi Elwell; Ukrainian-American Poets Respond (2022), published and coedited by Olena Jennings with Virlana Tkacz; The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making (Persea Books, 2019); Gondola Signore Gondola: Poems on Venice (Supernova, 2007), edited by Gregory Dowling and Rosella Mamoli Zorzi; Poems of New York (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2002), an addition to the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series, edited by Elizabeth Schmidt; and Telling and Remembering: A Century of Jewish American Poetry (Beacon Press, 1997), edited by Steve J. Rubin. 

Baumer is a professor emerita of English and the founding director of the creative writing program at Adelphi University. She has served as president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and director of the Poetry Society of America.