Tamarah Rockwood
it rhymes with 'camera'
About
Tamarah Rockwood is a poet, scholar, publisher, and speaker based on Bainbridge Island, Washington. She holds a degree in Creative Writing and Literature from Harvard University and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, where her dissertation (The Hospitality of Punctuation: A History of the Exclamation Mark in Poetry, with Special Attention to Modernist Practice and the Gendered Politics of Punctuation) examines the exclamation mark as a site of gendered power in literary history. Her creative doctoral project is GODIVA, a full poetry collection.
She is the Founder and CEO of Bainbridge Island Press, an independent poetry publishing house, and host of the POETICS podcast. In 2026, Bainbridge Island Press was named to Writer's Digest's 28th Annual 101 Best Websites for Writers, listed as #1 in the Poetry section in its first year on the list. She also publishes The Stanza, a weekly newsletter on craft and poetics, and teaches the POETICS Summer Workshop, a five-session seminar in poetics run through the press.
Her poetry has appeared in Liberties Journal, Brattle Street Review, The Galway Review, New Verse Review, One Art, Ultramarine Literary Review, Paddler Press, and others. Her poem "Calypso Praying in the Produce Section" was nominated by New Verse Review for Best of the Net 2026, and her poem "Coyotes Laughing" was longlisted for the 2019 University of Canberra Vice Chancellor's International Poetry Prize. She writes fiction as well, and her short story "The Bear" is forthcoming from Farside Review in 2026. She is the author of the collection A, B. and of Actually, her third collection, with two further manuscripts in progress: Alas! Alas! The Elegy for the Unicorn and A Shared Well, a book of Bainbridge Island poems.
Her work in the region runs through several organizations. She is Director of Ars Poetica WA, an interdisciplinary organization pairing poets and visual artists across Kitsap, Mason, Jefferson, and Clallam counties, now in its fourteenth year. She is producer and faculty for Centrum's Poetry on the Salish Sea in Port Townsend, Poetry Chair of the Madrona Beach Project in Seattle, and Chairwoman of the Literary Committee at the Rainier Club. She previously led Poetry Corners, an annual celebration of poetry on Bainbridge Island, and served as President of ANHW, the Alumnae/i Network of Harvard Women through the Harvard Club of Seattle, from 2023 to 2026.
She speaks regularly on poetry, punctuation, and the gendered history of literary form. In March 2026 she presented "Who Gets to Shout: Gender and the Exclamation Mark in Poetry" at Benedictine College's Annual Symposium on Transforming Culture in Atchison, Kansas, and in October she leads a featured workshop for the Oregon Poetry Association. Also in October she brings "The Engine of the Turn: Peripeteia and the Problem of the Mid-Length Poem" to the Twenty-Ninth Annual Conference of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where the paper takes its place in Seminar 22, The Golden Mean: How Mid-Length Poems Sustain Lyric or Narrative Momentum, convened by Sunil Iyengar and shared with Rachel Hadas, Michael Theune, Brian Brodeur, John Talbot, Paul Franz, and Mary R. Finnegan.
She lives on Bainbridge Island with her husband and their five children.
Based
Bainbridge Island, Washington
Education
Harvard University, AB Creative Writing & Literature
University of Birmingham, PhD candidate
University of Birmingham, PhD candidate
Press
Bainbridge Island Press — Founder & CEO
Organization
Ars Poetica WA — Director
Podcast
POETICS — Host & Producer
Festival
Poetry on the Salish Sea — Producer & Faculty, Centrum
PhD Research
The Hospitality of Punctuation
University of Birmingham
University of Birmingham
Recent Honor
Best of the Net nomination, 2026
Calypso Praying in the Produce Section
Calypso Praying in the Produce Section
Forthcoming
ALSCW Twenty-Ninth Annual Conference, Johns Hopkins University
"The Engine of the Turn," Seminar 22, Baltimore, October 2026
"The Engine of the Turn," Seminar 22, Baltimore, October 2026
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