Ethel Rackin is the author of four books of poetry: The Forever Notes (Parlor Press, 2013); Go On (Parlor Press, 2016), a National Jewish Book Award finalist; Evening (Furniture Press, 2017); and In Time (Word Works Books, 2025). In addition, she is the author of the text Crafting Poems and Stories: A Guide to Creative Writing (Broadview Press, 2022).

Her collaborative lyric sequence, “Soledad,” written with Elizabeth Savage, was awarded the 2016 Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred by Elizabeth Robinson, and another collaborative sequence, “Silent e,” is included in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, Jacket2, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Volt, and other journals.

She earned her MFA from Bard College and her PhD in English Literature from Princeton University. A MacDowell fellow, she has taught at Penn State Brandywine, Haverford College, and Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania, where she is a professor of English.