Amy Woolard is a legal aid attorney working on civil rights policy and legislation in Virginia. Her first collection, Neck of the Woods, received the 2018 Alice James Award from Alice James Books. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Boston Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere, while her essays and reporting have been featured in publications such as Slate, The Guardian, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

"There is grief in the book and there is guilt, both heightened by the other. How do we reckon with our own culpability—real or imagined or both—in a world saturated with violence?"
—Mary Ardery, Southern Indiana Review

“…this is poetry for the Netflix generation and is none the worse for that. Woolard has considerable control in these poems which have a greater surface variety than I have been able to write about here. The visual elements in the poems make them leap off the page even when they pull you into the sometimes sleazy, dissolute worlds of their narrators and characters.”
—Ian Pople, The Manchester Review

"Woolard injects her own brand of noir into her work, dims the lights on sunny good-old-boy lawlessness and homestyle justice to spin a dark narrative delivered through a whiskey haze and a bold lip."
—Irene Cooper for The Rumpus

“[Woolard’s] poems are smart, sexy, dark, witty, and surprising. I think that if I had bought just one book at AWP, it would have been her collection, Neck of the Woods.”
—Nin Andrews for Best American Poetry

”Amy Woolard’s Neck of the Woods is a book that abides between dark humor—’Tornados need to slow their roll & keep their cones tight’—and the kind of disasters rendered so casually that they seem all the more terrifying—‘tremored like seeing a landscape while your elbows/Are hooked onto somebody from the back.’ In all, this is a book about survival, but this speaker is honest enough to say she’s hasn’t been made whole: ‘A demolition after my own heart.’  What a lovely debut!”
—Jericho Brown

“Where can you be simultaneously prosecuted and seduced while you have your fool heart blessed? Here, in Amy Woolard’s Neck of the Woods, a book of such mesmerizing intensity that, while reading it, I often had to remind myself to breathe. Woolard is an artist far advanced in her idiom, riding poems deep into their thresholds. Her language is incisive, double-edged, wry, witty, and asks ‘for real’ about the stories we weaponize and their sharp fragments that glitter on our tongues. Each poem ‘walk[s] into the mouth/of an open question’ and is willing to be as sweet and as ruthless as it needs to be to get where it needs to go. A tour de force.”
—Mary Szybist

“Girl flees monster. Girl defeats monster. Girl becomes monster. The rural American South delivers one story disguised as many stories, many stories disguised as corn and slaw, a feast disguised as exploitation, a getaway that means you never leave. The Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz falls in love with you, and love means he will never leave you alone, but you are alone, because your best friend from when you were twelve will never come back: ‘now there’s just the blonde past.’ Amy Woolard’s poetry is sorcery, scary, intense, sugar-sweet, enticing, ready to ‘follow her scent into her last open question,’ and she knows what she’s about: it’s an atmosphere, an attitude, an smart answer, an intelligence with blood-red, beet-red roots. It stays with you. Stay close to it. Give it your time, your eyes, your page-perusing fingertips, your heart.”
—Stephanie Burt

Anonymous
Will Fitzhugh
Shawn Fremstad
Gillian White
Jennifer Woolard