Rachel Richardson

Rachel Richardson is the author of Smother (W. W. Norton & Co., 2025) and two earlier poetry collections, Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave (both from Carnegie Mellon University Press). She is the co-founder of the literary arts center Left Margin LIT as well as a former Wallace Stegner and NEA Fellow. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Lapham’s Quarterly, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. In 2024 she was named an inaugural Artists-in-Fire Resident through the Confluence Lab, and is now trained as an FFT2 wildland firefighter. She lives in Berkeley, California.