biography

Rachelle Toarmino is a poet from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collection That Ex and the chapbooks Comeback, Feel Royal, and Personal & Generic. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Poetry Daily, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in The Cosmonauts Avenue Anthology and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She was a finalist for Salt Hill Journal's 2021 Philip Booth Poetry Prize, Cosmonauts Avenue's 2018 Nonfiction Prize, and Cosmonauts Avenue's 2018 Poetry Prize. In 2019, her essay "He's Perfect" was named to Entropy's list of best online essays.

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Rachelle is the founding editor in chief of Peach Mag, an independent literary publishing project with an online journal, print anthologies, live and virtual events, and an editorial apprenticeship for teens. She is also an editorial advisor to Foundlings Press. She has presented both locally and nationally on topics such as building literary community, publishing protocols, and trends and developments affecting the independent publishing trade. In 2017, she served on the editorial advisory board of the anthology My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry.

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Rachelle recently attended the Tin House Winter Workshop for nonfiction and is currently working on a manuscript of prose, her second poetry collection, and a collaborative poetry project with the poet Julianne Neely. She lives between Buffalo and Western Massachusetts, where she is an MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Amherst.

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photos

by D. Arthur at That Ex: The Drive-In