Diane Raptosh
| Diane Raptosh | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Poet |
| Education |
College of Idaho University of Michigan |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Notable awards | 2013 National Book Award Nominee; Boise Poet Laureate; Idaho Commission on the Arts Writer-in-Residence |
| Website | |
| dianeraptosh |
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Diane Raptosh is an American poet of Sicilian/American descent who became the first poet laureate for Boise, Idaho, in 2013. Her book American Amnesiac was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award.
Raptosh grew up in Idaho and attended the College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho, where she earned her BA in literature and modern languages. She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan, after which she taught at a variety of institutions before returning to teach at the College of Idaho in 1990.
Raptosh has received three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts and holds the Eyck-Berringer Endowed Chair in English at The College of Idaho. In 2013, the Idaho Commission on the Arts awarded her the position of Writer-in-Residence, the highest literary honor in the state, for 2013-16. She was appointed the first Boise Poet Laureate in honor of the city’s 2013 sesquicentennial celebration.
She has completed literary residencies in such places as the Banff Centre and the Studios of Key West. Currently, Raptosh teaches literature and creative writing and directs the Criminal Justice Studies program at the College, the goal of which is teaching students to facilitate writing workshops in prisons and jails, juvenile detention centers and safe houses throughout southeast Idaho and western Oregon, and introducing students to the study of American prison writing.
Raptosh lives in Boise, Idaho, with her family.
Writing in varied forms ranging from prose poetry to sonnets, faux crossword puzzles to the ghazal, Raptosh’s poems visit and revise sociocultural and aesthetic norms, such that all axes may eventually point toward what one of the poems in American Amnesiac calls “the spine of a possible decency.”
Raptosh's first book of poems, Just West of Now (Guernica), was published in 1992. Her other books of poetry are Labor Songs (Guernica, 1999),Parents from a Different Alphabet (Guernicak, 2008), and American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press, 2013) in 2013.
The poems in Just West of Now are concerned with “our failures of communication, the limitations and possibilities of speech, the search for a literal and figurative home, the entanglements of love given and received,” according to a review by Alice Fulton, who notes further that “Raptosh’s work will please those who don’t read much poetry as well as those who read little else.”
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