Amy Woolard

Amy Woolard is a civil rights attorney and advocate in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her debut poetry 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, Fence, and elsewhere, while her essays and reporting have been featured in such publications as Slate, the Guardian, and VQR. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Breadloaf Writers' Conference. She also teaches courses on the intersection of law, artistic expression, and justice at the UVA School of Law, and holds a community residency with the Sound Justice Lab, a program of the Karsh Institute of Democracy at UVA.

See Work

POETRY / Spring 2017

Mise En Place

By Amy Woolard

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...

POETRY / Spring 2017

Place Like Home

By Amy Woolard

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

POETRY / Spring 2017

What She Didn’t Leave

By Amy Woolard

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...

REPORTING / Fall 2016

Tent Revival

By Amy Woolard , Photography by Dawn Whitmore

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...