A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for emerging women writers, my poems and prose have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Alaska Quarterly Review, APR, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, NER, and elsewhere.
I've received grants, awards, and scholarships from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and residencies from The McDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Headlands Center for the Arts. I'm on the Advisory Board of Litquake, the West Coast's largest independent literary festival, and am a contributing editor to ZYZZYVA and Copper Nickel.
author of
The Mansion of Happiness
Winner of the 2010 Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize.
Finalist for the Balcones Poetry Prize,
Northern California Book Award,
and Commonwealth Club's California Book Award.
Robin Ekiss's meditations on memory and mortality are a canary in the coal mine of imagination. With disembodied dolls, dank Parisian catacombs, the gilded interior of a Fabergé egg, and the unfathomable edge of Niagara Falls as the dominion of these poems, reading Ekiss's work is like peering into the perfectly still world of a diorama or daguerreotype: an experience both uncanny and uncompromising.
What people are saying
“Charmed by the curious, the miniature, and the grotesque, Robin Ekiss understands where such fascinations lead: into the dire complexities of feeling, recorded here with subtle formal intelligence and a deft control of tone.”
— Mark Doty, author of What Is the Grass? Walt Whitman in My Life
“A wondrous, instructive, and everywhere graceful book…”
— Carl Phillips, author of Pale Colors in a Tall Field
“It’s magical to find a first book that is, as Robert Frost put it, "‘play for mortal stakes.’”
— Ed Hirsch, author of Stranger by Night
“Robin Ekiss writes with force and elegance. The combination makes this book a superb debut.”
— Eavan Boland, author of The Historians
Read some poems
