February 08th, 2019

Meet PVWW's Intern: Cressida Richards!

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We are thrilled to welcome our first intern, Cressida Richards, to the PVWW team this season! Cressida is a poet, a recent University of Massachusetts Amherst grad, and a soon-to-be MFA candidate! She'll be working with PVWW's social media pages, blog, interviewing PVWW instructors and authors, and helping to organize a spring reading. We are so excited to work with her!

A Mini-Interview with Cressida Richards 

​Tell us about you! 
I am a poet from a teeny-tiny town in Connecticut called Wilton. I graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing in December of 2018. I am an avid bird-watcher, coffee-drinker, and novel-reader. 

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I have always loved to read and I think that, naturally, I began to wonder if I could write something someone might like to read, too. 

What do you write? What are you working on now?
I write poetry about family dynamics and habitats, with a grounding in avian imagery and behavior. Currently, I am writing a poem about magpies, who, amazingly, are one of only a few non-mammals on earth who can recognize themselves in mirrors. 

What's your favorite book of all-time? What was the last book you read?
My favorite book of all time is My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. The last books I read were Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris, and a collection of poetry by Daniel Hall called Under Sleep— both were phenomenal. 

What's one thing you're excited about?
The spring! 

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CRESSIDA RICHARDS holds a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was awarded the Class of 1940 Award for Poetry. She has represented her university at the annual Five College Poetry Festival. She was recently accepted to the University of Massachusetts Boston's MFA program and plans to attend in the fall of 2019.

JOY BAGLIO is the Founder & Director of Pioneer Valley Writers' Workshop and an associate fiction editor at West Branch. She holds an MFA from The New School, and her short stories have appeared in Tin House, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, New Ohio Review, PANK, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She's the recipient of grants and scholarships from Bread Loaf, The Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Speculative Literature Foundation. Visit her online at www.joybaglio.com.