Skip to main content

Amy Woolard

Amy Woolard is a writer and legal-aid attorney working on juvenile justice, school discipline, and poverty-policy issues in Virginia. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Virginia School of Law. Her poems have appeared in VQR, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Fence, and in the Best New Poets 2013 and 2015 anthologies, and elsewhere. She’s been awarded poetry prizes by Indiana Review and Puerto del Sol, and a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Her essays have run on Slate, Pacific Standard, the Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Author

Place Like Home

Spring 2017 | Poetry

I was asked to show up with a side dish. I made
A slaw of my longing. I had to keep it crisp. Nothing goes

Bad in a backyard, if you catch my drift. In a
Backyard everything is available like a catalog

Mise En Place

Spring 2017 | Poetry

The peonies are popping! A fist that is also a kettle that is also
A pact petals made with whatever cabal of bees decides to stick

Around. Let’s all us shake on it. Ah, these lungs of mine the perfect
Emergency orange of extension cord coil. All my breathing is

What She Didn’t Leave

Spring 2017 | Poetry


Dear friend, dear fearless        reader, dear soft spot, dear        drummer’s
Backstage sweat-soaked T-shirt        kiss, dear one                  sweet     world-without

-End, dear if you             find this, dear feckless, damned darkness,        dear friendless
Foundling pitbull & your shredded        fleece bed, dear pitiful                 scrawl, stained 

Photo by Dawn Whitmore

Tent Revival

Fall 2016 | Reporting

For three days, thousands of uninsured Americans converge on the Wise County Fairgrounds for the largest pop-up clinic in the country. Most are poor, many are in pain, but all have faith in a level of care that neither the government nor private industry can provide.