Rachel Zolf

Syd[1] Zolf (born 1968) is a Canadian-American poet and theorist. They are the author of five poetry collections: Janey's Arcadia[2](2014), which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, a Raymond Souster Memorial Award,[3] and a Vine Award;[4] Neighbour Procedure[5](2010); Human Resources[6](2007), which won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; Masque [7](2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Trillium Book Award for Poetry; and Her absence, this wanderer [8](1999), the title poem of which was a finalist in the CBC Literary Competition. A selected poetry, Social Poesis: The Poetry of Rachel Zolf,[9] was published in 2019, and a work of poetics/theory, No One's Witness: A Monstrous Poetics,[10] in 2021. They received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts[11] in 2018.

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Zolf's art video translation of three poems from Janey’s Arcadia [12] has shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Dunlop Art Gallery and other venues. Among their many collaborations, Zolf wrote the film The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Women’s Picture, directed by New York artist Josiah McElheny, which premiered at Art Basel Miami [13] and showed at the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Arts Club of Chicago and elsewhere. They also conducted the first collaborative MFA in Creative Writing ever, The Tolerance Project.[14]

Zolf teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. They were the founding poetry editor for The Walrus magazine and have edited several books of poetry. Their archives are held at York University in Toronto, Ontario,[15] and at Simon Fraser University's Special Collections in Burnaby, British Columbia.[16]

Brian Teare's review of Human Resources in the Winter 2008 Lambda Book Report situates Zolf as "one of an extremely talented generation of Canadian lesbian/queer writers whose innovative cross-genre work comes to us after that of radical foremothers Nicole Brossard, Gail Scott and Erín Moure."[17]

They are the child of author and broadcaster Larry Zolf.