The distance from brutalized girl to loving mom is wider than one page. Rachel would know. She's been both. And she's filled the space between with poetry.

You can hear it when her voice glows warm with wisdom. Or rage. Or love.

“Reading aloud brings new blood,” says the mother of five, who lives in Rochester.

“Many topics I thought were scarred over, often reopen when I'm working them out for the page, and then reopen when I resurrect them for the stage,” Rachel says.

She usually waits until there's a safe distance from an experience before she writes about it. Still, the emotions are never far from her voice when she reads.

“I get emotional when reading my poetry,” she says, “and I usually don't rehearse or over-read them, so they feel new again when we meet onstage.”

And sometimes, she breaks her own rule about waiting, and writes while the feelings are still raw and fresh.

“Those are the poems that choke me up when I'm reading them to an audience.”

RachelChoked up or not, her confessional work reveals a deep, dark well of courage. That's clear from her first published collection, Pink Elephant (Cypher Books, 2009), which captures her fearless look back through life's chapters. The critically acclaimed book is taught in MFA programs around the country.

Rachel's work as an instructor has taken her around the country, too—and helped others heal along the way. She taught poetry through the Healing Arts Program at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan for four years. Today, she teaches creative writing in housing projects, needle exchanges, high schools, hospitals and universities.

“Teenagers, drug addicts, the mentally ill. I get along best with underdogs,” Rachel says. “I don't trust people who haven't struggled. I can't relate to people who have it easy.”Reviewer Barbara Jane Reyes, writing for The Poetry Foundation, says Pink Elephant “illuminates for us how the process of survival, which she has taken into her own hands, is a lifelong, ugly, and non-miraculous one.”

Nothing's come easy for her—including success. But she's found it anyway. The same year her book was published, Rachel was named 2009 Women of the World poetry slam champion, after nearly a decade on the circuit. Slam poetry—in which writers read and are judged—draws eighty teams of poets from cities around the U.S., who compete in the National Poetry Slam.

Between raising a family and traveling to teach and share, where's the space for writing?

“There are only two months in the year when I write,” Rachel says. “And when I do, I write about 20 to 30 poems in that time.”

She works after the kids have gone to bed.

“I write between 1:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m.,” she says. “Sometimes I listen to music. The band Dark Dark Dark was on repeat while I wrote the final poems for Pink Elephant.”

In the end, it's not the time of day or the soundtrack that makes things happen. It's simpler than that.

“My best work has always come from me sitting down and just writing,” she says.

“The words are already in my head, waiting for their turn.”

See more: rachelmckibbens.com

Say hi: rachelmckibbens@gmail.com

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Rachel got her start at an open mic program in 2001 in her native California. Since then, she's made a name for herself as a New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow and a poetry slam champion. She's also appeared on HBO's Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry and in the documentary, Slam Planet: War of the Words, which premiered at the SXSW film festival in 2006.

Below, she shares "Central Park, Mother's Day" at inkSLAM 09 in Los Angeles. (Adult language)