Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three award-winning poetry collections and has served as the poet laureate of Georgia since 2019. Her work is marked by quiet intensity and explores relationships between form and content, and between the self and the world.
Rathburn was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1975 and raised in Miami, but her maternal family has lived in Georgia for nearly two centuries. She earned a B.A. in English from Florida State University in 1997 and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Arkansas in 2001. After receiving her master’s, she relocated to Decatur, where she taught workshops at Emory University and served as poetry chair for the Decatur Book Festival.
Rathburn’s first full-length collection, The Shifting Line, won the Richard Wilbur Award in 2005. The book employs traditional forms, including sonnets, triolets, rhyming quatrains, and blank verse meditations, though in ordinary language. The inconsistent boundaries invoked by the collection’s title recur throughout, as Rathburn shows readers that the line between love and antipathy is often transient and illusory. On the strength of this debut, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, which funded a research trip to France and Poland. These travels, the dissolution of her first marriage, and her second marriage to the poet James Davis May, inspired her next manuscript, A Raft of Grief, which won the 2012 Autumn Press Poetry Prize and was published in 2013.
While containing sonnets and other formal poems, A Raft of Grief finds Rathburn largely freed from the constraints of iambics and rhyme. The book was praised for its innovative and nuanced voice, as well as its deft exploration of such themes as alcoholism, marital disfunction, and, in the end, the self-reclaiming power of new love. Particularly notable are the poems that Rathburn calls “travel eclogues,” conversations between a young wife and husband as they travel through Europe and become increasingly estranged from one another. Deeply personal, these poems nevertheless address universal concerns, including the anguish of loss and the redemptive power of acceptance. Shortly after completing A Raft of Grief, Rathburn began teaching at Young Harris College in the mountains of north Georgia, where she designed and directed the undergraduate creative writing program.
Rathburn’s third collection, Still Life with Mother and Knife (2019), was named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read” by the Georgia Center for the Book and received the 2020 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry. It consists of four interlocking sections. The first section mines childhood and adolescence, exploring the speaker’s sexual awakening and its attendant dangers. The second section takes the speaker through childbirth and the frightening world of postpartum mental illness. And the third presents conversations with Eugene Delacroix’s paintings and sketches of Medea, the sorceress of Greek myth who murders her sons. In the fourth section, which focuses on the healing to be found in parenting a young child, “Medea” exchanges her knife for a bar of soap, as she stands in the shower being watched by her daughter, who “studies me / the way I’ve stood before a work of art.” Unflinching, at times bitter, and ultimately restorative, these poems of mothers and daughters show Rathburn at her most poignant.
One month after the publication of Still Life with Mother and Knife, Governor Brian Kemp appointed Rathburn poet laureate of Georgia. In this capacity, she serves as an ambassador for the literary arts at events across the state. Since 2019 Rathburn has taught creative writing at Mercer University in Macon, where she lives with her daughter and husband.
