Jennifer Richter was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship in Poetry by Stanford University, where she taught in the Creative Writing Program for four years. She earned her MFA at Penn State University.

Richter is “a skilled and courageous poet determined to tell it in luminous verse, no matter what.”
—Dorianne Laux

Her poetry collection Threshold was chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natatsha Trethewey as winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition. The book was released by Southern Illinois University Press in April 2010, and has since been a national bestseller.

Richter’s work has appeared in many national publications, including Poetry, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, CALYX, Cloudbank, and  A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry.

Richter has been leading poetry workshops for the past 18 years: first at Penn State, then in the Bay Area, and, now, in Oregon. During the years she spent writing and teaching at Stanford, she also taught grades K-12 for California Poets in the Schools, and for four years led a poetry workshop for recovering substance abusers at the Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco. She has taught poetry in elementary schools and with the Portland-based Community of Writers Program, and she teaches for the Stanford University Online Writer’s Studio. She lives in Oregon with her husband, the novelist Keith Scribner, and their children. She’s currently Visiting Poet in Oregon State University’s MFA Program.