Rachel Richardson is the author of three books of poetry, SMOTHER (forthcoming from W. W. Norton & Co. in 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 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, an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA in English from Dartmouth College. Rachel is the Co-Founder of Left Margin LIT, a literary arts center in Berkeley, California, and serves on the board of the Bay Area Book Festival. She is currently Distinguished Visiting Writer in the MFA program at St. Mary's College of California.