MARGO BERDESHEVSKY born in New York City, often lives and writes in Paris. Her newest book is It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat, from Salmon Poetry in Ireland. Her Kneel Said the Night (a hybrid book in half-notes) is from Sundress Publications. Her Before The Drought, from Glass Lyre Press, was finalist for the National Poetry Series. Author as well of Between Soul & Stone and But a Passage in Wilderness (from Sheep Meadow Press). Her book of illustrated stories, Beautiful Soon Enough, received 1st Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for FC2 (University of Alabama Press.) Her poem, “Somewhere Everywhere” was selected by the Academy of American Poets for the poem-a-day. Recipient of 2022 Grand Prize for Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, Honorable Mention 2026 for The Eric Hoffer Book Award Poetry Category. Her works appear in Poetry International, New Letters, The Night Heron Barks, Kenyon Review, Plume, Scoundrel Time, Cutthroat, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Harbor Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, Jacar—One, Mānoa, Pirene’s Fountain, Big Other, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, Bracken “Over Tea and Tears” for Ukraine, among many others. In Europe and the UK, her works have been seen in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, Confluences Poétiques, Recours au Poème, Levure Littéraire, Under the Radar. She has read from her books in London, Paris, New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and at literary festivals. Her “Letters from Paris” have appeared for many years in Poetry International online, for example https://poetryinternationalonline.com/letter-from-paris-in-march-2019

For more information, kindly go to her website at: http://margoberdeshevsky.com

"There is in Margo Berdeshevsky’s work a rare persistence of the lyric voice, used with a sense of ecstasy & grief almost religious in its evocations.  Absolutely modern & fearlessly romantic by turns, the poems circle the rich & threatened corners of the living planet & travel further into places marked by mythic & oneiric time. With the publication of But a Passage in Wilderness, Berdeshevsky emerges, fully empowered, as the maker of a new poetry that pushes voice & image toward creation of a world 'barbaric, vast and wild' that Diderot once saw as marker of what all poetry must be."—Jerome Rothenberg

"[This first book] is an extraordinary mixture of emotional power and beauty. It's not like anything else I have read lately or in the past. So MUCH verbal beauty, out of the here-and-now, woven with an extraordinary openness to what is precisely NOT beautiful in human life, making that an intrinsic part of the poem's texture . . . at once quintessential poems of witness and poems with the eternal quality of the tale or fable: a truth co-existent with the truth of observation, intrinsic to the words and the perceptive, humane imagination that engendered them . . ."—Marilyn Hacker

"What makes But a Passage in Wilderness a unity, a big book and a small cosmos, is the depth of feeling it conveys, abundant and interactive, embodied and sensual. The poems are unfailingly fluent with emotional understanding, accurately invoked. A faithful dailyness radiates her words, even in her most daring flights. 'Mother-ground,' she says, 'show me roots in your bare dirty kiss.' She has taken her store of our language to heart."—Marie Ponsot