Patricia Traxler is an award-winning poet, essayist, and fiction writer. A two-time Bunting Poetry Fellow at Radcliffe, she also served as Hugo Poet at the University of Montana, Thurber Poet at Ohio State, and as visiting writer at many other universities around the U.S. Her novel, Blood (St. Martin's/Macmillan) was also published in Spanish, German, and Swedish translations, as well as in a UK/Ireland edition. Her poetry collection, Naming the Fires, received the 2019 Kansas Book Award in Poetry.
Traxler's short stories have won several awards, including The Writer's Voice of New York City Award for Short Fiction, the Cecil Hackney National Short Story Award, the Georgia State University Short Story Award, and in Ireland, The Moth Magazine's 2019 Short Story Prize:
"...brings the reader right up close to passion and its loss, loneliness and despair. A very unusual take on a subject we all think we know, but this is fresh and exciting...you want to read it again as soon as it's over." --novelist Kit de Waal, Judge of The Moth's 2019 Short Story Prize
Of Traxler's novel, Blood, novelist Margot Livesey wrote: "Seldom have the twin obsessions of love and art been more vividly or intelligently portrayed...What an elegant, suspenseful debut."
The Toronto Sun wrote, "Bloody good--a compelling and beautifully written novel."
The Boston Phoenix "Patricia Traxler's brainy thriller probes the rich ways in which this life substance intersects with love, desire, friendship, sex, and spirituality."