Amber McBride

Amber McBride is a poet, novelist, and folklorist who writes for children and adults. She earned an MFA concentrating in poetry from Emerson College, worked with the Furious Flower Poetry Center, and taught at the University of Virginia and James Madison University for a decade before writing full time. She also identifies as an herbalist and Hoodoo practitioner, traditions that inform her attention to ancestors, nature, ghosts, and the unseen.

Her young adult debut, Me (Moth), follows two grieving teenagers on a road trip shaped by art, ancestry, Hoodoo, and Diné cultural roots. Caitlyn Paxson's NPR review observed that the spare verse continually layers imagery, history, and spiritual traditions, while the National Book Foundation judges emphasized the book's engagement with survivor's guilt, mental illness, collective memory, and healing.

Across later books, McBride continues to use speculative and folkloric forms to write about Black childhood, depression, historical erasure, community, and survival. Discussing Gone Wolf, she described imagination as a form of medicine: a way children can self-soothe and a way communities can picture freedoms that do not yet exist. Her bibliography now spans young adult and middle grade verse novels, an edited anthology of Black poetry, and an adult poetry collection.