About
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 been awarded an NEA and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. 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 for the Long Poem. She 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 trained as an FFT2 wildland firefighter. When she is not in residence at Michigan, Rachel lives in California. Her next book project is about practices of ecological and cultural prescribed burning.
