Burgi Zenhaeusern (she/her) grew up in Switzerland. She majored in English and Spanish Literature and Linguistics at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and attended workshops led by Rose Solari, Jean Nordhaus, Laura Fargas, and Yvette Neisser at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. She is the author of White Door (Carbonation Press, 2025), her debut full-length poetry collection. Her chapbook Behind Normalcy (CityLit Press, 2020) won the 2019 Harriss Poetry Prize, chosen by Erica Dawson, final judge, and Kwame Alexander, series editor. She co-edited the translations of the bilingual poetry anthology Knocking on the Door of the White House (Zozobra Publishing, 2017, J. Ballesteros et al., editor), which was selected by Beltway Poetry Quarterly as a “2017 Ten Best” book. Her poem “To her fury” was a runner-up in the inaugural Ashland Poetry PressBroadside Contest 2023. Work of hers appeared in a variety of journals and in the anthology From the Belly: poets respond to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (Karren Alenier, editor, The Word Works, 2023). She volunteered behind the scene for the Café Muse reading series and served as consulting editor for the online journal River Mouth Review. She lives in Chevy Chase, MD, on Piscataway and Nacotchtank land. 

 

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The header on this website features a detail of “Memo: Night,” 2008 (soda cans, wire, lead, soot) by sculptor Paul Villinski. The piece is privately owned. The black and white detail shows two soot-blackened butterfly shapes cut from soda cans pinned to a white wall. 

This page also shows a black and white headshot of the author with a winter-scarf around her head. She is leaning one hand against a tree trunk in wintry woods. Photo credit: the author’s spouse.