For Bucks County Community College Professor Ethel Rackin, it all began with a seventh-grade writing prompt.
“When I told my teacher I didn’t know how to write poems, he said, ‘just try to compare yourself to something else using like or as,’" Rackin said about her class at Germantown Friends School. “So, I think I compared myself to a tree, and then he encouraged us to develop our comparison. And from then on, I was hooked on writing poetry.”
Now, Rackin has published her fourth poetry collection, “In Time” (Word Works Books, 2025). She described the collection as poems of grief and discovery, of connection, and the strange time travel that is the life we each lead.
"I took to poetry because it offered me a space to say things that would otherwise have been difficult or impossible to say," said Rackin. “I also think that the associations that you can make between one thing and another in a poem was something that really spoke to me. The ability to use dream-like logic, associative meaning, visual clues—all of that was the right language for me.”
Rackin, who grew up in Philadelphia, earned her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, her MFA from Bard College, and her Ph.D. from Princeton University. She has taught at Bucks County Community College for 14 years, where she is also the director of the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program and the Wordsmiths Reading Series.
She says her work as a published author helps her students by making their studies feel more relevant.
“I think it makes me more empathetic towards their struggles, because writing for all of us, even for published writers, is really challenging,” said Rackin. “I think it also puts me in touch with what's happening right now in the culture in terms of writing, and I hope to bring that to my students through the Wordsmiths Reading Series and through the selections that I teach in class, so that they can get a better understanding of writing as a living art, and writers as real people just like them with the same kinds of struggles and situations that we all deal with.”
Rackin launched “In Time” this spring when she appeared at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference and Book Fair in Los Angeles with other authors from her publishing house. The local launch took place last Friday at the Doylestown Bookshop, 16 S. Main St., Doylestown, PA, 18901.
In addition to her books of poems, Rackin is the author of the text “Crafting Poems and Stories: A Guide to Creative Writing” (Broadview Press, 2022).
To learn more, visit Ethel Rackin's website.
Professor Rackin returns to the classroom this fall to teach English Composition, Creative Writing, and other courses in the School of Language and Literature.
