ABOUT

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Rachel Linn Shields is a literature scholar and creative writer. Her areas of interest include ecocriticism, translation, and poetics.

She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Washington, where she received the Eugene Van Buren Prize for her thesis project. She was the 2020 Artist-in-Residence at the Printery Book Arts Lab at Central Print. Her creative work includes poetry translations from Middle English, short stories with embroidered illustrations, and books that are meant to be assembled by the reader – among other things.

She completed a Ph.D. with distinction in medieval literature from St. Louis University in 2024 and her dissertation received the Walter J. Ong Award for Excellence in Research (curriculum vitae). She is currently working on a scholarly manuscript about the rewilding effects of Middle English poetic forms as well as a collection of translated medieval poems.