Amy Butcher

Amy Butcher is an award-winning essayist and the author of, most recently, Mothertrucker (Little A, 2021), which interrogates the realities of female fear, abusive relationships, and America’s quiet epidemic of intimate partner violence set against the geography of remote, northern Alaska. The book earned critical praise from Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, The Wall Street Journal, Good Morning America, CBS News, The Chicago Review of Books, The Oxford Review of Books, Booklist, and others, with Publisher’s Weekly writing that the book “explores myriad issues with nuance and grace, including Indigenous rights, violence against women, religious hypocrisy, and environmental concerns.” Excerpts of Mothertrucker also received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, with judges calling the book “well researched,” “very well-written,” and “a positive antidote to the trauma of violence against women.”

Her first book, Visiting Hours, earned starred reviews and praise from The New York Times Sunday Review of Books, NPR, The Star Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and others.

Additional essays have been featured on National Public Radio and the BBC, anthologized in Best Travel Writing, awarded grand prize in the Iowa Review Award as judged by David Shields, and been awarded notable distinctions in the 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021 editions of the Best American Essays series. Her work has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, The New York Times “Modern Love,” The New York Times Sunday Review, The Washington Post, The Denver Post, The Iowa Review, Lit Hub, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, and Brevity, among others.

In 2024, she was awarded an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council for work on her new book.

She earned her MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and is the recipient of Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Creative Writing Fellowship in nonfiction as well as grants and awards from the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Ohio Arts Council, Word Riot Inc., and the Stanley Foundation for International Research. She is an Associate Professor of English at Denison University and teaches annually at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska.