Jennifer Richter’s bestselling first collection Threshold (2010) was chosen by former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as a Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Winner; former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky chose it as an Oregon Book Award Finalist. Her second collection, No Acute Distress (2016), was a Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection and was chosen by Major Jackson as an Oregon Book Award Finalist. Her work has appeared widely: in ZYZZYVA, The Los Angeles Review, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, Poetry, and elsewhere. Richter’s third collection, Dear Future, won the Tenth Gate Prize for midcareer poets and was published by Word Works Books in May 2024.

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 started her teaching career while earning her MFA at Penn State University; in the three decades since, she’s worked with elementary, high school, and college students, retirees, recovering substance abusers, and youth in local correctional facilities. She’s currently Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oregon State University, where she teaches in their MFA program. Richter is a Chicago native who lives in Oregon’s Willamette Valley with her husband, the novelist Keith Scribner, and their grown children.

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