• Age: 15 to 18
• Grade: 10 to 12

Tamar Rubin grew up immersed in Hebrew, Jewish traditions and texts, in a secular household, the daughter of an immigrant mother. In becoming a physician, she learned yet another language: medicine.

The poetry in Tablet Fragments, Rubin’s first published collection, weaves between the texts of all her learning, deploying evocative biblical mythopoetics and the precision of medical science.

Writing as a diagnostic eyewitness to the complexities of her life, Rubin explores the natural history of familial and romantic relationships, the impacting of migration and displacement, and her composite identities as outsider and insider; as doctor and her own body; as daughter, lover, mother and poet.

Tamar Rubin is a Winnipeg physician, writer and mother. She has published her work in both literary and medical journals, including Vallum, Prairie Fire, CV2, The New Quarterly, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Hippocrates Medical Poetry Anthology, and others. Her unpublished chapbook, Tablet Fragments, was shortlisted in Vallum's 2017 chapbook contest, and her poems were long listed in Room magazine's 2017 Poetry Contest and CV2's 2018 Young Buck Contest.

Tamar Rubin's profile page