Out of Places

<p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Amy Le Ann Richardson</strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)> is the author of two poetry chapbooks: </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Make Believe Worlds We Built Together</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)> Bottlecap Press 2023 and </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Who You Grow Into</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)> Finishing Line Press 2024. Her work is featured in multiple journals including </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel </em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>and </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Still: The Journal</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)> 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.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>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.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>-Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. author of </span><em style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Gay Poems for Red States</em></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>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.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>-Marianne Worthington author of </span><em style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>The Girl Singer</em></p>