Diane Raptosh

Diane Raptosh (born October 14, 1961) is an American poet of Sicilian/American descent who became the first poet laureate for Boise, Idaho, in 2013, a position that was eliminated after her tenure. A self-described "noted author, poet and educator," “highly active ambassador for poetry,” and “cutting-edge advocate,” Raptosh grew up in Idaho and attended the College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho, earning a BA in literature and modern languages. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, returning to teach undergraduates at the College of Idaho in 1990. She is the mother of Keats Conley, whose first book, Guidance from the Gods of Seahorses, was a finalist for the Wandering Aengus award and was published by Green Writers Press in 2021. Both mother and daughter use alliteration, assonance, and puns to craft whimsical poems.

Raptosh received three literature fellowships 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 entire state of Idaho.

At the College of Idaho, Raptosh teaches literature and creative writing and directs the Criminal Justice Studies program, through which Raptosh and students facilitate year-long writing workshops in prisons, jails, juvenile detention centers and safe houses throughout southeast Idaho and western Oregon, and are introduced to the study of American prison writing.

Raptosh lives in Boise, Idaho, with her family.

Works Well known within Idaho, Raptosh writes in forms including prose poetry and sonnets. She is interested in what one poem in American Amnesiac calls "the spine of a possible decency."

Raptosh's first book of poems, Just West of Now (Guernica, Canada), was published in 1992. Her other books of poetry are Labor Songs (Guernica, 1999), Parents from a Different Alphabet (Guernica, 2008), and American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press, 2013).

Her second collection, Labor Songs, "speaks in many voices in order to scrutinize the world from multiple perspectives... to chart a complex geography centered in Idaho but further reaching out towards Michigan, Florida, Alaska, and beyond," according to Sandra M. Gilbert. H.L. Hix writes that "American Amnesiac makes a genre of the condition its protagonist suffers: it is a dissociative fugue. What its speaker cannot remember, its reader will not forget."

Of her fifth collection, Human Directional (Etruscan Press 2016), Craig Morgan Teicher wrote, "Nothing is off limits to the whirling speaker of Diane Raptosh’s Human Directional, because ‘the space of// the thinkable is so much/ larger’ than any one kind of poem, any form, any tone, can contain. So here are spidery couplets, blocks of off-kilter prose, Q&A as poetry, new compound words, fractions and factoids, whatever’s necessary to speak the mind of this ‘every anyone,’ ‘a human tornado’ whose careening meditations cover everything from Wittgenstein to ‘blue-footed-boobies’ to ‘Gayle next door...’ Raptosh is at heart an old-fashioned lyric poet, endearingly lonesome, hopeful about the prospect of a reader’s company, generous with her ample wisdom and energy: ‘I am here,’ she writes, ‘because I have this tightness in my throat/ I don’t want taking over the earth,’ and because ‘I fall slightly in love with whoever I get to/ stand next to.’ It’s hard not to feel loved by these poems, and to love them."

Her sixth collection, The Zygote Epistles, is about the poet becoming a grandmother, and is a collection of poems addressed to a zygote.

According to Etruscan Press, her next work will "reclaim with intimacy the spiritual, sexual and political history of Victoria Woodhull, an American feminist purged from the annals,” and will appear in an anthologized trio of works titled Trio. Raptosh has said that “likely due to her perceived threats to the established social order, Woodhull remains curiously absent from mainstream historical narratives.”

Raptosh's work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Terrain.org, Michigan Quarterly Review and OccuPoetry.

Honors and awards 2013: American Amnesiac longlisted for National Book Award 2013–2016: Idaho Writer-in-Residence 2013: Boise Poet Laureate 2007: Fellowship in Literature, Idaho Commission on the Arts 2001: Fellowship in Literature, Idaho Commission on the Arts 1991: Fellowship in Literature, Idaho Commission on the Arts

Full-length poetry collections Human Directional. Etruscan Press. 2016. American Amnesiac. Etruscan Press. 2013. Parents From a Different Alphabet. Guernica Editions. 2008. Labor Songs. 1999. Guernica Editions. Just West of Now. 1992. Guernica Editions.

Selected anthologies Trio: Planet Parable, Run: a Verse History of Victoria Woodhull, and Endless Body, 2021 Verse/Chorus: A Call and Response Anthology, 2014 The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets, 2013 Classifieds: An Anthology of Prose Poems, 2012 New Poets of the American West, 2010 Mamas and Papas On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Act of Parenting, 2010 Families: The Frontline of Pluralism, 2008 Sinatra... but buddy, I’m a kind of poem, 2008 Writing With An Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors, 2002 Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers, 2001 Woven on the Wind: Women Write About Friendship in the Sagebrush West, 2001

TEDx Talk In 2015, Raptosh gave a TEDx Talk in Boise, Idaho called “Poetry, Democracy, and the Hope of Sounds” in which she describes the poet as "language’s bodyguard," citing her mother’s linguistic influences on her. "Poetry retunes language into angles of truth," she says.