Amanda Auchter is the founding editor of Pebble Lake Review and the author of The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award, and of the chapbook, Light Under Skin. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Theodore Morrison Poetry Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Marica and Jan Vilcek Prize for Poetry, the Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award, and the James Wright Poetry Award. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches creative writing and literature at Lone Star College in Houston, Texas.
Winner of the 2012 Perugia Press Prize
“The Wishing Tomb is a lyric history of New Orleans’ beauty and brutality, both human and environmental. Amanda Auchter is a poet of rare elegance and dexterity who writes just as movingly about gunshot as she does the markings of brick-scratch left on the tomb of Marie Laveau. Every city deserves the subtle attention of such a poet, a poet brave and nimble enough to touch every line of the city’s rough, loved, and disastrous skin.”
—Katie Ford
“In these textured, deftly-crafted stanzas, Amanda Auchter romances the grit, the rampant spice, the twang, the mystery, the brick, the swelter, and the insistent hallelujah conjured by the Crescent City. This sparkling, defiant love story pays tribute to NOLA on the upswing, while remembering how often it has teetered on the edge of descent.”
—Patricia Smith
Perugia Press
