Amanda Newell

Born and raised in southern Maryland in the heart of the Chesapeake Bay region, Amanda Newell graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in English from Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland and earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College.

Her chapbook, I Will Pass Even to Acheron, was selected as a 2021 winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize and was inspired by her former student, a Marine who nearly died in Afghanistan after the M-ATV he was driving was struck by a command-controlled improvised explosive device. She began writing the poems while he was hospitalized at Walter Reed recovering from a partial leg amputation. They bear witness to survival in the aftermath of trauma, but they also contemplate the speaker's own complicity in the broader cultural narrative that perpetuates war and war-making.

Her first full-length collection, Postmortem Say, is forthcoming in 2023 from Červená Barva Press.

In 2015, Lynn Emanuel selected her poem, “A Woman From the Infant Mortality Review Board Calls” as the winner of Carlow University’s Patricia Dobler Poetry Award.

“Music has to make itself distinct from noise, and poetry has to take back language from the clutches of the internet, the W9 form, the committee, and the TV. It is this taking back of language that is at the heart of Amanda Newell’s powerful and brave poem.”

—Lynn Emanuel

Newell is also the author of the chapbook Fractured Light (Broadkill River Press), winner of the 2010 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Gargoyle, North American Review, RHINO Poetry, Scoundrel Time, and elsewhere. The recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and The Frost Place, she was also awarded a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Newell is currently an associate editor for the contemporary poetry journal Plume.

amandanewellpoet@gmail.com