Jennifer Richter is the author of the poetry collections Threshold (2010) and No Acute Distress (2016), both Crab Orchard Series Selections and Oregon Book Award Finalists. Her work has appeared in many national publications, including ZYZZYVA, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, CALYX, Poetry Northwest, and  A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry.

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

Richter lives in Oregon with her husband, the novelist Keith Scribner, and their children. She currently teaches in Oregon State University’s MFA program.