Amanda Williams

Amanda Williams holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and her chapbook, Little Human Relics, was published in May 2016 by Unsolicited Press. She is the recipient of a Jackson Fellowship and a Teaching Fellowship from Hollins University, as well as the Gertrude Claytor Prize in Poetry from the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have been published on Poets.org, in Sugar House Review, PoetryFix, Silver Birch Press, Artemis: A Journal for Artists and Writers from the Blue Ridge Region and Beyond, Jam Tarts Magazine, and the Red Truck Review. Her essays have appeared in AAAA Magazine and The Morning News.​

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About the Book
The poems in Little Human Relics weave through various notions of home: a family farm, the mythic backdrop of Bavaria, a cityscape of urban noise and expectations, and quiet interiors of domestic life. Whether overhearing a lament about marriage at a nail salon, or standing vigil over the grave of a newly-buried horse, these poems invite readers to step over the page’s threshold into a kitchen... a gothic cathedral... a lover’s bed. These poems celebrate the ways in which devotion elevates all things in one’s life to a position of reverence; a poem which marvels at the brutality of religious relics is placed alongside one which depicts the mending of a child’s nightgown, and both the religious veneration and a small act of love inspire equal awe. As the title suggests, these poems are carefully captured moments that may have flown past, but instead are a constellation of objects, events, and characters which hold emotional truth and stark beauty. Like relics, they exist to both conjure memory as well as teach readers a little bit more about what it means to be human.

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