UNKNOWN

Amy Le Ann Richardson is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Make Believe Worlds We Built Together, Bottlecap Press 2023, and Who You Grow Into, Finishing Line Press 2024. Her work is featured in multiple journals, including Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel and Still: The Journal and often explores the interplay between humanity and the environment, reflecting on the urgent issue of climate crisis and our relationship with the land. Amy earned her MFA from Spalding University (‘09), spent several years teaching university writing courses, and currently works for a non-profit organization supporting farmers and food systems across Kentucky. She is a farmer, writer, and visual artist who has received grants and fellowships from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which have allowed her to explore her passions more fully and to bring them into her community through artmaking. She lives and works on her farm in Carter County, KY.

Advance Praise for Out of Places

“I do not want to be painted like one of your French girls. I want to be described looming in the past like one of Amy Le Ann Richardson's trees, to be seen gathering myself across white space like her rocks, to be felt in ink spilling over banks like her creeks. Richardson digs deep into the soil of her Kentucky, of her Appalachia, and beating through generations of pain and love and mud is a heart forged in dirt."
—Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. author of Gay Poems for Red States

“From her beloved Carter County, Kentucky, Amy Le Ann Richardson builds a shrine of words to the natural world. Fueled by a love of the outdoors, the poet observes and records her surroundings with a keen expertise of natural disasters, climate failures, and the ‘lungs of earth gasping.’ Yet she never despairs, balancing catastrophe with contemplation and abolishing fear with veneration of ‘these small wonders’ in her firmly-rooted place.”
—Marianne Worthington author of The Girl Singer

“Amy Richardson’s stunning poems aren’t simply poems of place, or motherhood, or the climate crisis; they live at the intersection of apparently conflicting impulses—elegy and ode, mourning and celebration, joy and alarm—what John Keats called “negative capability.”Amid this whirlwind of ideas and feelings, Richardson stands tall and throws open her arms in love and frustration and wonder. While her Kentucky roots are on proud display throughout this collection, Richardson’s concern for both the environment and the people who have contributed to its possible collapse make her a citizen of the world. Her finely wrought poems elevate her work beyond the confines of regional literature. This deft, plainspoken collection is a tonic.”
—Doug Van Gundy, Author of A Life Above Water and Director of the West Virginia Wesleyan Low-Residency MFA Program