Lori Rottenberg was born in the Bronx to a Jewish family with recent immigrant roots. Her father’s parents were émigrés from Nazi Germany, and her mother’s family had come from Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire a generation before to flee pogroms. After her parents’ divorce, she grew up in a more rural part of New York State in Orange County and attended Hamilton College on scholarship. She met her husband on a college study-abroad program in Spain and graduated with a degree in Creative Writing, winning the annual poetry prize.
Rottenberg started her career as a writer, editor, and program manager for non-profits in the Washington, DC area. After having children, she worked as a visiting poet for Arlington Public Schools (APS), an actress in professional children's musicals, a drama and arts consultant for APS, and a freelance writer and instructional designer for a variety of organizations. In 2012, she began to teach English to international students at the university level.
Rottenberg has written and published throughout this long career. She is the author of The Enchantress Queen and The Ghost Who Made Me, an autobiographical "novel-in-verse" of interconnected poems with a clear narrative arc that won the 2025 Changing Light Prize from Livingston Press. Her poetry, flash CNF, and lyric essays have appeared in numerous regional and national journals. Her poetry has been featured on county buses as part of the Arlington Moving Words program, she has been asked to participate in readings and festivals throughout the Washington, DC area, she has written literary criticism for Literary Mama, and she has written materials for Jewish-Unitarian worship that have been shared nationally.
Her creative writing moves across forms—traditional poem, prose poem, flash essay, lyric memoir—but returns persistently to the archaeology of family history, questions of Jewish identity and inheritance, displacement, and what it means to exist at all given the contingency of survival. She is equally comfortable excavating a 1940 census record, a grandmother's piece of jewelry, the architecture of a family home, or a child's stamp collection for what they reveal about lives shaped by history, luck, and love.
Rottenberg holds a Masters in Linguistics and an MFA in Creative Writing, both from George Mason University. She has taught poetry to Honors College students at GMU and English and academic writing to international students at the university level for about fifteen years.
She lives in Arlington, Virginia.
Rottenberg started her career as a writer, editor, and program manager for non-profits in the Washington, DC area. After having children, she worked as a visiting poet for Arlington Public Schools (APS), an actress in professional children's musicals, a drama and arts consultant for APS, and a freelance writer and instructional designer for a variety of organizations. In 2012, she began to teach English to international students at the university level.
Rottenberg has written and published throughout this long career. She is the author of The Enchantress Queen and The Ghost Who Made Me, an autobiographical "novel-in-verse" of interconnected poems with a clear narrative arc that won the 2025 Changing Light Prize from Livingston Press. Her poetry, flash CNF, and lyric essays have appeared in numerous regional and national journals. Her poetry has been featured on county buses as part of the Arlington Moving Words program, she has been asked to participate in readings and festivals throughout the Washington, DC area, she has written literary criticism for Literary Mama, and she has written materials for Jewish-Unitarian worship that have been shared nationally.
Her creative writing moves across forms—traditional poem, prose poem, flash essay, lyric memoir—but returns persistently to the archaeology of family history, questions of Jewish identity and inheritance, displacement, and what it means to exist at all given the contingency of survival. She is equally comfortable excavating a 1940 census record, a grandmother's piece of jewelry, the architecture of a family home, or a child's stamp collection for what they reveal about lives shaped by history, luck, and love.
Rottenberg holds a Masters in Linguistics and an MFA in Creative Writing, both from George Mason University. She has taught poetry to Honors College students at GMU and English and academic writing to international students at the university level for about fifteen years.
She lives in Arlington, Virginia.