Biography

Ohio-born poet Amanda Williamsen holds degrees in English literature and writing from Wittenberg University and Johns Hopkins University.  She is a past Poet Laureate of Cupertino, California, and a current founding board member of the poet laureate program on Bainbridge Island, Washington. 

Her teaching career spans more than twenty-five years in a variety of settings, from fellowships at Johns Hopkins and the University of Alabama, to teaching adult students at Capital University in Dayton, Ohio, to faculty positions and poet-in-residence appointments at a number of private schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Currently, she teaches poetry to adults, both online and on Bainbridge Island, and has served as a visiting poet for the island’s middle school.

She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, the recipient of a Judson Jerome fellowship to the Antioch Writers Workshop, and a long-time member of the San Francisco Mission Pie Poets.  In the classroom, her teaching has earned commendation from the University of Alabama and the Southwestern Ohio Council of Higher Education.

Amanda Williamsen’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Midwestern Gothic, New Ohio Review, Baltimore Review, Red Wheelbarrow, The Fabulist, The MacGuffin, The Doctor T. J. Eckleberg Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Pathways: a Journal of the Ohio Humanities Society.