RACHEL RICHARDSON
Rachel Richardson is the author of three books of poetry, SMOTHER (forthcoming from W. W. Norton & Co., 2025), and Hundred-Year Wave (2016) and Copperhead (2011), both selections in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. 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 Magazine, Lit Hub, Yale Review, APR, 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, and University of San Francisco's MFA in Creative Writing. She is currently Distinguished Visiting Writer at St. Mary's College of California's MFA in Creative Writing Program. She also offers private writing coaching and editing.
Rachel is the Co-Founder of Left Margin LIT, a literary arts center in Berkeley, California. She also directs poetry programming for the Bay Area Book Festival. She lives in Berkeley, half a mile from where she was born.