About

A recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Wendy’s fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, will be published by Terrapin Books in 2022.

Her third collection, Before There Was Before, was published by Iris Press in 2017. She is also the author of Western Motel (Turning Point, 2012), and a chapbook, Drive-ins, Gas Stations, the Bright Motels (Pudding House, 2007), which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Barrow Street, Cider Press Review, Ibbetson Street, J Journal, Mid-American Review, Mom Egg Review, Nimrod, Nixes Mate Review, One Art, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, Rogue Agent, Salamander, The Atlanta Review, The Lily Poetry Review, The Hudson Review, Solstice, Sugar House, Tar River Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Worcester Review, Twelve Mile Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and others; featured on Verse Daily and WBUR’s Cognoscenti; and in the anthologies Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and Burning Bright: Passager Celebrates 21 Years. 

Her ekphrastic poem “Notes from the Column of Memory” won the Juror’s Prize in Art on the Trails: Mending, an installation of sculptures at the Beals Preserve, Southborough, MA, summer 2021. She also won a writing prize for her ekphrastic poem “What’s to Be Is Already Written,” based on a photo from the Griffin Museum of Photography’s exhibit “Once Upon a Time: Photographs That Inspire Tall Tales,” November 23–March 6, 2022, Lafayette City Center, Boston. Her poem “And I Say Yes to the Way the Grass” was published on masspoetry.org for Mass Poetry’s online series, The Hard Work of Hope, and was also featured on a placard in the window of the Harvard Coop, Cambridge, MA, as part of the Harvard Square Poetry Stroll, December 11, 2021–January 2, 2022. An excerpt from one of her poems was featured by Mass Poetry as “Rain Poetry” on a Salem, MA, sidewalk.

A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Wendy grew up Denver, Colorado, and now lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, with her husband and two formerly feral cats. She was an editor of language arts materials for many years, and has been a poetry editor for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. In 2016 she co-authored her first children’s book, Buzz, Ruby, and Their City Chicks. Since 2018 she has been the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA. She also serves as Programming Co-Chair for the New England Poetry Club. Wendy  has been both a poetry editor and cavity-nest monitor for the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

Wendy’s daughter Julia Baron, son in law, and granddaughter live in Brooklyn, NY. Her son, the actor Noah Baron, and daughter in law live in Encino, CA.

Wendy Drexler - Photo by Debi Milligan

Photo credit: Debi Milligan, 2022

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