For Chelsea Rathburn, writing and teaching are deeply connected. Her passion for both fuels her work as a poet and an associate professor of English and creative writing at Mercer University, where she blends her love for literature with her dedication to helping students find their voice as new writers.
Today, Rathburn is an award-winning poet and Poet Laureate of Georgia. She said her love for writing began early in her life. As a child growing up in Miami, her mom, a preschool teacher, would take her to the public library daily, and Rathburn said she would check out “stacks and stacks of books.” For her, the joy of reading replaced the toys and games that she often didn’t have.
“From a really young age, books were this escape,” she said. “It was this space of pleasure, happiness and joy — all the good stuff.”
She began writing short poems at the age of 6, and in junior high, she attended a creative writing program at a magnet school for the arts. She would go on to pursue her Bachelor of Arts at Florida State University, where she studied poetry seriously starting in her first semester, when her professor suggested she leave his introductory poetry course and join his intermediate workshop.
Later, during her time at University of Arkansas, where she received her Master of Fine Arts, Rathburn was required to hold a graduate teaching assistantship as a part of her program and found her love for teaching immediately.
After graduation, she worked for several years in marketing communications and used her writing skills to serve a nonprofit organization. She also did freelance writing for video scripts, websites, articles and brochures.
Eventually, Rathburn realized she missed the classroom. She began teaching community writing workshops and went on to teach part time at Georgia Tech and Emory University. She said returning to education was an easy fit.
“With a good poem, I’m often taking an experience and then making a metaphor out of it it make it meaningful for a reader. Similarly, in the classroom, I’m often looking for ways to make connections between the things my students care deeply about and whatever text we’re reading,” she said. “So, for me, I really do feel like there is this natural affinity between the metaphor-making that poets do and that teachers do.”
From 2013-2019, Rathburn worked to develop and direct a creative writing program at Young Harris College in North Georgia. In 2019, she said she “jumped at the chance” to work at Mercer.
“Mercer’s student body is so interesting. We sometimes joke about the banners that say, ‘Everyone majors in changing the world,’ but I think there’s truth in that tagline. Mercer students really are truly engaged. I can have conversations in the classroom here at a higher level than some of the other places that I taught,” she said.
Rathburn is a narrative poet who said she “tells stories to make sense of the world.” Her creative process varies depending on the project, but most of her work is inspired by a driving question she has about broad themes such as fear, motherhood and love. Through her poetry, she uses personal anecdotes to speak to the larger human condition.
“I typically tell stories that are rooted in my personal experience, but I hope that if I tell them well, they open up and have some significance for somebody else,” she said.
Rathburn has published three award-winning collections of poetry, including Still Life with Mother and Knife, which was named a New York Times “New & Noteworthy” selection and recognized as one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read” by the Georgia Center for the Book. Her work has also appeared in prestigious publications such as Poetry, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Notre Dame Review and The Cincinnati Review. In 2009, she was named a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.
Rathburn has served as the Poet Laureate of Georgia since 2020. She said while the title is somewhat ceremonial, it is an honor to serve as a state ambassador to the literary arts. Her duties include judging a statewide high school poetry content and speaking to community groups about poetry. In 2021, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, funded by the Mellon Foundation, to implement Georgia Poetry in the Parks, a civic project that placed poems by Georgia poets in public parks.
She hopes her work as an educator and writer can help people learn to navigate both themselves and the world.
“As a creative writing instructor, I’m giving students specific writing tools: say, how to construct a short story or how to construct a powerful poem,” she said. “But I think on another level, I’m also saying, ‘Here are these larger tools of self-expression. Here are frameworks and ways of understanding yourself and the world around you.’
“I think that the work I do extends beyond the classroom because these are tools for making sense of difficult times, difficult experiences. You can take those tools with you the rest of your life, and I hope my students do.”
