Rachel Richardson / Poet

Rachel Richardson is the author of three books of poetry, Smother (W. W. Norton & Co., 2025), Hundred-Year Wave (Carnegie Mellon, 2016), and Copperhead (Carnegie Mellon, 2011). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. Her poetry and prose appear in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, at the Poetry Foundation, on The Slowdown, and elsewhere.

Rachel received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award and the Theodore Roethke Prize. She also holds an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BA in English from Dartmouth College. She has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, Stanford, University of San Francisco, and, most recently, as Distinguished Visiting Writer at St. Mary's College of California in the MFA Program in Creative Writing. In fall 2026 she will be the Helen Zell Visiting Professor of Poetry at the University of Michigan.

Rachel is the Co-Founder of Left Margin LIT, a literary arts center in Berkeley, California. In 2024 she was named an inaugural Artists-in-Fire Resident through the Confluence Lab, and is now trained as an FFT2 wildland firefighter. She lives in Berkeley, California.