From the Directory of Writers

Robin Chapman

Poet
Madison, WI

Robin Chapman is a scientist and a poet who grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and attended Swarthmore College and the University of California at Berkeley. She is author of six full-length poetry collections, including The Way In and Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos (with J.C. Sprott’s fractals), both winners of the Posner Poetry Award; The Dreamer Who Counted the Dead, winner of an Outstanding Achievement Poetry Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, and Abundance, winner of the Cider Press Editors’ Award. About Abundance, poet Kelly Cherry writes, “Impeccably crafted, passionate, and attentive, Robin Chapman’s new poetry collection distills the subtle beauties of the northern plains.” Her chapbooks include The Only Everglades in the World, an account of a tandem kayaking trip through the national park. She co-edited the anthology On Retirement: 75 Poems. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Hudson Review, The Iowa Review, and OnEarth, among many other journals, and the anthologies The First Yes, Poetry Comes Up Where It Can, The Shape of Content, and Strange Attractors: A Collection of Mathematical Love Poems, among others. A recipient of three Wisconsin Arts Board grants, including a 2007 Literary Arts Fellowship, she is a member of Poetry Fire Poetry Quartet. Her poems have been incorporated in the paintings of Canadian artist Colleen Anderson-Millard and set to music by Canadian composer Sara Turner and Americans Stephen Paulus and Joseph Dangerfield. Co-founder of Epidemic Peace Imagery, an exhibit of poetry and painting from over 500 artists that has been traveling since 2003, she is a professor emerita of Communicative Disorders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received the 2006 Career Research Scientist award from the Academy on Mental Retardation for her work on language learning in children and adolescents with Down syndrome. She teaches poetry workshops at The Clearing, a folk school in Door County, and elsewhere. Robin posts a poem most weeks from fellow & sister poets with one of her watercolors on Robin Chapman’s Poem a Day Blog. She lives with her husband Will Zarwell, kayaker and Irish accordionist, in Madison, Wisconsin.