Rachel Camacho

Rachel Camacho is a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow and misfit educator with three acclaimed full-length books of poetry, blud (2017) Into the Dark & Emptying Field (2013) and Pink Elephant (2009, re-released in 2026.)

In 2012, Camacho founded The Pink Door Writing Retreat, an annual intensive held exclusively for non-men writers of color in upstate New York.

Camacho was recently the subject of the podcast We Were Three, from the producers of Serial.

She believes Palestine will be free in her lifetime.

Pink Elephant

Forthcoming Spring 2026

Button Poetry is thrilled to re-release Rachel Camacho’s critically-acclaimed debut Pink Elephant.

Pink Elephant is a song of survival, gritty and honest, brutal and beautiful. Camacho’s entrancing storytelling and rich language are hypnotic–refusing to let the reader look away. The collection dissects a coming-of-age within an abusive home, the recovery from that trauma, and what building a family looks like in the aftermath.

Dark but edged with humor, Pink Elephant still embraces love through its troubles. If you haven’t read it yet (or need an excuse to read it again), you have to pick up this newest edition!

PRAISE FOR PINK ELEPHANT

Camacho’s lovely and serrated debut collection reminds us why poetry as testimony is so necessary. Camacho does not romanticize victimhood; she simply means to show us how unchecked violence reproduces itself.

— Barbara Jane Reyes, The Poetry Foundation

Pink Elephant is the white elephant in the room blushing into visibility, and Rachel Camacho is a poet of unparalleled, unflinching honesty. With the tenacity of a survivor’s “love-sharp teeth,” Camacho confronts the trauma of girlhood/womanhood—“the malicious thunder of it”—and gives the “inaudible song of happiness” a palpable, perceptible shape. This book is startling testimony, and it will bruise the touch of all those who dare to turn its relentless pages.

— Rigoberto González, To the Boy Who Was Night

I literally woke up in the middle of the night thinking about these poems. They are compellingly beautiful with a perfectly-toned sadness. If these poems don’t move you, you’re dead inside.

— Bucky Sinister

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