Robin Becker

Robin Becker (born 1951) is an American poet, critic, feminist, and professor.

Becker earned a BA and MA at Boston University. She taught for many years at the MIT before returning to Pennsylvania in 1994, where she is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women's Studies at Penn State.

Becker is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Tiger Heron and Domain of Perfect Affection. Her All American Girl won the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in Poetry. In 2000 she was honored with Penn State's George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, and she served as Penn State Laureate in 2010-11. Other honours include fellowships from The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies of the City University of New York, The William Steeple Davis Foundation, the Mary Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Becker’s interest in narrative springs from her family background, including a childhood spent listening to her grandmother’s stories, learning from her the nuances of storytelling and her family’s history in Ukraine. Becker was also greatly influenced by the women writers whose poetry was available in the 1970s, including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, and Susan Griffin. Poet Stephen Dunn regards Becker as achieving “what may be one of the early twenty first century’s most difficult accomplishments—to write a credible poetry of affirmation. In the doing, she doesn’t pretty up the world. Rather, she finds language that embraces our dualities, our many-selved presences, regularly demonstrating her kind of perfect affection.”