Susan Edwards Richmond writes about the relationship between humans and wild nature. She has published four chapbooks of poetry, Increase, Purgatory Chasm, Birding in Winter, and Boto, and her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. A passionate naturalist, she is poet-in-residence at Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio in Harvard, Massachusetts, and works at Mass. Audubon's Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary.

Books by Susan Edwards Richmond:

Other poems on the web by Susan Edwards Richmond:
"Consumed"
"Beginners"

Susan Edwards Richmond on Facebook.

About Before We Were Birds:

"Transformation-or to be more precise, transfiguration—is at the heart of Susan Edwards Richmond's work: person into creature, creature into god. So we are invited to consider how intertwined our lives are with the world around and inside us. Richmond's subtle, alluring poems embody the beauty and strangeness of those rare moments when we can feel what we are able to see."
—Lawrence Raab

"Richmond's poems in this collection continually ask us to imagine the natural world as rife with spirits, ones that for a moment in the ongoing metamorphoses have taken on the form of dolphin or snowy owl, for example, or a fox that stops and stares right back. With stunning imagery and gentle, meditative music, Richmond conjures a sense of sacred wildness in all things. In a world as endangered by meanness and indifference as ours, no lesson seems more important."
—Fred Marchant

"In these subtle, thoughtful poems, Susan Edwards Richmond invites readers to dive into mystery and the unknown. That invitation comes in many forms and settings - whether the speaker is following a mystical pink dolphin into the deep, birding at night, or interacting with the creatures and people in her everyday life. The writing is always full of sound and motion. As Richmond follows the spirits around her, she enables readers to experience their presence as well."
—Elizabeth Lund