Amy Wright grew up on a family farm in southwest Virginia to earn an B.A. from the University of Virginia, M.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Ph.D. from the University of Denver. Growing up in the Appalachian Mountains inspires her to integrate culture, science, art, and nature in her writing. She has been awarded two Peter Taylor Fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, an Individual Artist Grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her contest-winning essays have featured in Georgia Review, Fourth Genre, Kenyon Review, Minding Nature, and elsewhere. Wright co-edited and introduced the Virginia volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology. She has worked as the nonfiction editor and senior editor of Zone 3 journal and for 17 years as the nonfiction editor of Zone 3 Press. Author of three poetry books and six chapbooks, her nonfiction debut, Paper Concert (Sarabande Books) won the 2022 Nautilus Gold Award for Lyric Prose. The same year she served as the Wayne G. Basler Chair of Excellence at East Tennessee State University, where she now teaches.

“This volume’s singularity is well suggested by five contributors who have won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Rita Dove, Claudia Emerson, Forrest Gander, Henry Taylor, and Charles Wright. As if prompted by the same geography that creates adaptations between plant and animal species, these exemplars have each been shaped by and in turn, shaped their environments.” —Amy Wright, Introduction

“Paper Concert is an invitation to slow down and consider complicated questions for which there are no absolute answers.” — Buzzfeed

“Reading Everything in the Universe is like walking through a natural history museum exhibit curated by Andy Warhol…” —Nicole Sheets, review in Kenyon Review

“In her latest poetry collection, Amy Wright …raised in the Appalachian region of Southwest Virginia…bring[s] this region and its characters to life. Jax Ovie, Virginia Leabus, Coralee Robins, Leda Burke, Belle Neely, and Edna Culpepper, these are just a few of the folks whose daily grinds and deep affections fill Wright's poems. And as you can tell from these names alone, Wright portrays her people with what you'd hope from a poet: lyric delight.” —Eric LeMay, interview New Books Network