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 No Acute Distress was a Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection and was chosen by Major Jackson as an Oregon Book Award Finalist.

Her first book Threshold has been a national bestseller and was named an Oregon Book Award Finalist by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.  Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey chose Threshold as winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition.

Richter’s work has been featured in many national publications including ZYZZYVA, The Los Angeles Review, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, and Poetry.

Richter has been leading poetry workshops for the past 25 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 for the Portland-based Community of Writers Program and for Stanford University’s Online Writer’s Studio. She lives in Oregon with her husband, the novelist Keith Scribner, and their children. Richter currently teaches in Oregon State University’s MFA program.