Membreweisburd

Stefi Weisburd's first collection The Wind-Up Gods (Black Lawrence Press, 2007) won the St. Lawrence Book Award. She is the recipient of a "Discovery"/The Nation prize, was a Bread Loaf Scholar and was awarded a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency. She's been nominated for the Pushcart Prize 12 times. Her poems for adults have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Born, Poetry Daily and many others.

With degrees in physics from Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley, Weisburd is fascinated by science, and many of the poems in The Wind-Up Gods are informed by that awe including the adventures of Newtonian Girl, a woman who wants to live in the predictable world of Newtonian physics but who is forced to live in the nonintuitive kingdom of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Of the Wind-Up Gods, Roger Weingarten writes: “Imagine Scherherazade weaving a thousand nights, Orpheus transplanted to the southwest plucking his lyre while riding a twister, the sullen art side of Dylan Thomas, and a scientific historian who tackles the mysteries of laundry and human weather with the same keen eye as [Weisburd] takes on the universe ...”

Charles Harper Webb writes: “Welcome to the world of “The Wind-Up Gods,” where Newtonian Girl struggles to maintain a few clockwork certainties in the face of quantum anarchy ...”, or Paul Guest: “It is that rare book unafraid of ambition and ideas, of scope while never sacrificing emotion, never receding into dead rhetoric.”

Weisburd's collection for children is Barefoot: Poems for Naked Feet (Wordsong Press, 2008).

Weisburd has worked as a Congressional analyst, an editor and staff writer at Science News, a freelance writer and an educational outreach coordinator for a nanoscience program at the University of New Mexico. She was an American Association for the Advancement of Science Mass Media Fellow at Business Week.