Mystery - Poetry - Literary Journalism
Rosemary Herbert is a writer whose work spans genres. Her poetry chapbook, Sisters in Time, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2026, and her poem "Grave Finds" was named "Noteworthy" in the 2024 Coniston Prize competition. This work is centered on her experience unearthing a pagan burial in a fourth-century, Roman-era cemetery in Winchester, England.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Radar Poetry, The Last Milkweed: An Autumnal Anthology of Poetry (Tupelo Press), GRIFFEL, Remembering William Butler Yeats (Moonstone Arts Center), Tiny Seed Literary Journal and their Poetry of the Wild Flowers anthology, and elsewhere. She contributed interviews to The Paris Review and Harvard Review. Her eight books include the Edgar Award-nominated The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing; A New Omnibus of Crime; The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories; Whodunit? A Who's Who in Crime & Mystery Writing; Twelve American Crime Stories; Murder on Deck! Shipboard & Shoreline Mystery Stories; Front Page Teaser: A Liz Higgins Mystery; and The Fatal Art of Entertainment: Interviews with Mystery Writers.
Her opening scene for a thriller, "A Man in the House," was selected by Scottish crime-writing luminary Val McDermid for inclusion in CrimeBits2: 100 Opening Gambits for Great Thrillers & Linked Mystery Puzzles. The book is forthcoming from Black Spring Press in the UK in August 2025, and in the US in November 2025.
She served as a reference librarian at Harvard University's Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, as book review editor and garden columnist at the Boston Herald, and she worked at the Portland Press Herald and in several newsrooms. Her book reviews have been published in the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and more. She is also a photographer whose author portraits appear on many books.
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A native of Long Island, New York, and longtime New Englander, she now resides in Akron, Ohio, where she also pursues ceramic arts.