year after her child's birth. The poems have that same "Oh! I'd forgotten about how beautiful/hard/sad/quiet/fierce that was" quality that all true stories about the first year of parenthood do, and made me laugh and tear up a little and feel nostalgic and sad for new mothers everywhere. Barenblat is also author of several poetry chapbooks, among them the skies here (Pecan Grove Press, 1995), What Stays (Bennington Writing Seminars Alumni Chapbook Series, 2002), chaplainbook (Laupe House Press, 2006), and the self-published Through, a collection of miscarriage poems (2009.) From 2005 to 2010, Barenblat was a student in the ALEPH rabbinic program; she was ordained a rabbi in early 2011. She started a blog, Velveteen Rabbi, in 2003, and in the spring of 2008, it was named one of the top 25 blogs in Time.com's First Annual Blog Index. She has guest-blogged at Jewess, Kesher Talk, Sojourner, and the Best American Poetry Blog, and she spent a year writing weekly Torah commentaries for Radical Torah. Her poetry appears in The Heart of All That Is: Reflections on Home (Holy Cow! Press, 2013), Before There Is Nowhere to Stand (Lost Horse Press, 2012), and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2013), among others. With Thurman Hart, Barenblat co-founded the first Progressive Faith Blog Con, a gathering for bloggers of progressive faith which took place in Montclair, New Jersey in 2006. Her Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah for Pesach, a free and open-source haggadah which combines traditional texts with poetry and creative interpretations, is used worldwide. Personal life Barenblat lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She married Ethan Zuckerman in 1998, and they have one son. They divorced in 2016. Since 2011 she has served as the rabbi for Congregation Beth Israel in North Adams, MA. She has also served as interim Jewish chaplain to Williams College. References External links Velveteen Rabbi FP Interviews Rachel Barenblat America's Most Inspiring Rabbis 2016 “Judaism Shines Through Everything They Do: Ginsburg, Sandberg, Barenblat” by Haley Codron. Orlando Sentinel, May 9, 2017. Rachel Barenblat, “Is Ranting Against Globalism Anti Semitic?” Forward, October 24, 2018. Writers from San Antonio 1975 births Williams College alumni Poets from Texas American women bloggers American bloggers Living people Jewish bloggers Jewish American writers People from Berkshire County, Massachusetts Women rabbis American women poets 21st-century American poets 21st-century American women writers American Jewish Renewal rabbis 21st-century American Jews Mashpi'im