Bio

Amy Monticello is the author of Close Quarters, a chapbook memoir about unconventional divorce (Sweet Publications), and the essay collection How to Euthanize a Horse, which won the 2016 Arcadia Press Chapbook Prize in Nonfiction. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the North American Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, under the gum tree, the Iron Horse Literary Review, Hotel Amerika, CALYX, The Rumpus, and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies; featured on Salon, The Establishment, Everyday Feminism, Quiet Revolution, and other popular websites; anthologized in Going Om: Real-Life Stories On and Off the Yoga Mat; and listed as notable in Best American Essays. She is also co-author, along with husband Jason Tucker, of The Routledge Introduction to American Life Writing (2023), part of Routledge’s Introduction to American Literature series. Her awards also include the 2013 S.I. Newhouse School Prize for nonfiction awarded by Stone Canoe and the 2025 Long Story/Essay Prize from the Iron Horse Literary Review.

Amy grew up in Endicott, New York, a small town in the Southern Tier. She has a B.A. in writing from Ithaca College and an M.F.A. from The Ohio State University. Since 2008, she has lived and taught in Ohio, Alabama, New York, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts. From 2015-2019, Amy was a regular contributor at Role/Reboot, where she wrote about gender, politics, and life as a working mother. She is currently finishing a memoir-in-essays tentatively titled Imagine the Worst and Other Essays on Catastrophe, Grief, and Joy.

Amy is an associate professor and the department chair of English at Suffolk University. She lives in Boston, MA with her husband and daughter.

Headshot by Michael J. Clarke at Suffolk University