Amy Dryansky (she/her) is the author of two poetry collections, one from Alice James, How I Got Lost So Close to Home (1999), winner of the New England/New York Award, and Grass Whistle (Salmon Poetry, 2013), winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for poetry.

Amy’s poems are included in several anthologies and appear in a variety of journals, including Barrow Street, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, Radar, The Sun, and Tin House, She’s also received fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Dryansky teaches creative writing, currently as the James Merrill Visiting Poet at Amherst College, and works as a grant writer for a regional land conservation agency.

“Amy Dryansky puts her faith in what Zbigniew Herbert once called the art of ‘uncertain clarity.’ Which is to say, she makes doubt her friend. She uses doubt—instead of being used by it—and gets it to do some wonderfully bright things in the dark. I mean bright as in smart: humor in the face of suffering, compassion without sentimentality, and that ache at the center of life—those are her specialties. These poems have their wits about them at all times, side by side with an honesty enviable for its calm and exactness.”
—David Rivard

“How I Got Lost So Close to Home is a joyous collection of poems written by a woman whose best gifts include accuracy and risk. I love the free-fall of this book, its vivid, spirited language, its truths. If poetry is a high wire act, Dryansky awes her audience. And it is in her willingness to try new feats—without a net—that she startles us with her sweep and balance, her poise in the face of the uncertain, and her nerve.”
—Deborah Digges