Rachel Blau DuPlessis, a 2002 Pew Fellow and poet, scholar, and critic whose work explored feminism, modern society, and human connection, died on September 2, 2026. She was 86.
For more than 50 years, DuPlessis wrote poems that experimented with syntax and form. She is best known for her long work Drafts, which she began in 1986 and published over the course of 100 installments through 2012. In a 2002 interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, DuPlessis said her poems reflect “awe at the universe, grief at the barbarity of modernism, and sense of how it was to be in the world.”
DuPlessis’ poetry has been published in more than 30 books, and she has written several scholarly books, including Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers and The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, and has edited many others. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews and Poems for the Millennium, as well as publications like The Kenyon Review, Diacritics, and Contemporary Literature.
Born in Brooklyn in 1941, DuPlessis received a bachelor’s degree in English at Barnard College in 1963 and a master’s degree and doctorate in English and comparative literature at Columbia University in 1970. She taught at Columbia early in her career, as well as Rutgers University, and Trenton State College (now College of New Jersey) before moving to Philadelphia.
From 1974 to 2011, she was a professor of English at Temple University, teaching classes on modern and contemporary poetry, and establishing the school’s creative writing and women’s studies programs. Temple honored her in 2013 by establishing the DuPlessis Lecture in Poetry and Poetics. According to the University, “her poetry often speaks to the concerns of her critical work and her critical works often stretch the conventions of the scholarly essay,” and the interweaving of these practices is “one of her significant contributions to the field of poetry and poetics.”
Read more about DuPlessis and her legacy in an obituary from the Philadelphia Inquirer, and listen to her read and discuss Drafts at the University of Pennsylvania’s poetry archive PennSound. For more, visit her website, and read her work on Poets.org.