Amy Wright was initially invited to ETSU in a visiting role as the Wayne G. Basler Chair of Excellence. In 2024, she joined the faculty after serving Austin Peay’s campus as a professor and nonfiction editor of Zone 3 Press and senior editor of Zone 3 journal. She is excited to bring her experience back to the region and students who share a love for it, as she does, having grown up in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Denver and has authored three poetry books, six chapbooks, and co-edited the Virginia volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press, 2022). Her nonfiction debut, Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round, (Sarabande Books, 2021) won a Nautilus Gold Award for Lyric Prose. She has twice been awarded a Peter Taylor Fellowship to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.