About


Photo by Paul Goyette

Hila Ratzabi is a poet, writer, and editor. Her first full-length book of poetry, THERE ARE STILL WOODS (June Road Press, 2022) won a 2023 gold Nautilus Award and was a finalist for a National Indie Excellence Award. She was a finalist for the Fourth Genre Steinberg Essay Prize (2019) and for the Fifth Annual Narrative Magazine Poetry Contest (2013). She is the author of a poetry chapbook, The Apparatus of Visible Things (2009). Her essays have appeared in the Ten Percent Happier blog, the Wisdom Daily, the Jewish Daily Forward, Kveller, Alma, MUTHA Magazine, and others. Her poetry has been published in Narrative, Linebreak, Drunken Boat, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, The Nervous Breakdown, The Normal School, and other journals. Her poetry also appears in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She has received scholarships and fellowships to the Willapa Bay AiR residency, the Vermont Studio Center, the Crater Lake National Park residency, and the Arctic Circle Residency.  

She was editor-in-chief and poetry editor of the literary journal Storyscape (2011–2017) and the founder of the Red Sofa Salon & Poetry Workshop, a workshop and reading series that took place in Philadelphia (2011–2016). She was director of virtual content & programs at Ritualwell.org (2015–2023). Ratzabi is currently director of communications at North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, IL. She lives in Oak Park, IL, with her husband and two children.

Ratzabi holds an MFA in Poetry Writing from Sarah Lawrence College (2007), a BA in English from Barnard College (2003), and a BA in Jewish Philosophy from the Jewish Theological Seminary (2003).

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