Author Profiles

Amy Butcher is an award-winning essayist and author of Mothertrucker (Little A, 2021), a book that 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. The Wall Street Journal writes that Mothertrucker is “a rattling good story” that is “shot through with poignant insights.” Publisher’s Weekly writes that the book is “tender and gripping,” writing, “[Mothertrucker] explores myriad issues with nuance and grace, including Indigenous rights, violence against women, religious hypocrisy, and environmental concerns.” Kirkus Reviews calls the book “a searching and deeply empathetic memoir,” writing, “[Mothertrucker] is a sobering reflection on verbal and psychological abuse [that] honors the healing power of female friendship and questions the nature of divinity beyond its constricting patriarchal manifestations.” Excerpts of Mothertrucker also won 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,” and in July 2019, Mothertrucker was optioned by Makeready Films for film development with Primetime Emmy-winning Joey Soloway directing and Academy and Golden Globe-winning actress Julianne Moore in a starring role. In February 2020, Golden Globe nominee Beanie Feldstein signed on to play Amy. Her first book, Visiting Hours (Blue Rider Press/Penguin-Random House, 2015), earned starred reviews and praise from The New York Times Sunday Review of Books, NPR, The Star Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and others. Most recently, her January 2019 essay “Flight Path” was awarded grand prize in The Sonora Review’s  flash prose contest, and her May 2018 essay, “Women These Days,” was thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice nominated for inclusion in the Best American Essays series by the editors at Brevity. Her work has been featured on National Public Radio and the BBC, anthologized in Best Travel Writing 2016, and awarded grand prize in the 2016 Solas Awards’ “Best of Travel Writing” series and the 2014 Iowa Review Award as judged by David Shields. Her essays have also been awarded notable distinctions in the 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021 editions of the Best American Essays series. Additional essays have 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. Her 2016 op-ed, “Emoji Feminism,” published in the New York Times Sunday Review, was cited by Google as the inspiration for eleven new professional female-empowered emojis, accepted by the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee in July 2016 and incorporated in January 2017 in all iOS software packaging internationally. Additional writing appears in The Best of Brevity, Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, The Best Travel Writing 2016, The Soul Of A Great Traveler, Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction, The Best of Vela, and Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays. She earned her MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and is the 2012-2013 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 the Director of Creative Writing and an Associate Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University and teaches annually at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska. She lives in Ohio with her three rescue dogs, beautiful beasts.