After working in theater for most of her life, Amanda Quaid began writing poetry in 2023, as a way to work creatively with illness. That same year, one of her first poems, “Patient and Daughter Appear Closely Bonded,” was awarded the Bridport Prize, one of the UK’s largest awards for a single poem, selected by Roger Robinson.

Subsequent poems have been highly commended for the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry & Medicine, named a finalist for the Philadelphia Stories’ National Prize in Poetry, twice longlisted for the UK’s National Poetry Competition, shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and published or forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Rattle, Poetry Is Currency, Mom Egg Review, Broadsided, LONESOME, Book XI, DMQ Review, Bombay Gin, Tendrils, and Metphrastics. An erasure self-portrait made from her doctors’ notes won the Brooklyn Poets’ Yawp Poem of the Month and was the runner-up for Poem of the Year. Her debut collection, No Obvious Distress, a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, is out now with John Murray Press and was named Memoir of the Month by the Independent.

She was raised in New York City, where she works as a dialect coach and lives with her husband and daughter. She founded and co-edits the ekphrastic poetry journal Metphrastics.

Photo by Josiah Bania