River Elizabeth Hall
(she/her)
 
River Hall is a poet, naturalist, educator and Amherst Writers & Artists affiliate. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Parentheses, Pontoon Poetry, Bear Review, Cirque, Into the Void, Main Street Rag, Nimrod, and Tinderbox among others. She is a 2023 Best of the Net Nominee and winner of Tinderbox Poetry's 2022 Majda Gama Editor's Prize for her poem "Straying". In 2021, she was a semi-finalist in the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award and was long-listed for both the Palette Poetry Prize and the Frontier Open. She holds an MA in Education from Antioch University Seattle & an Interdisciplinary BA from Fairhaven College.
 
After graduating from the Immersion Program at Wilderness Awareness School and becoming a naturalist in 2014, she taught environmental education, wilderness survival, wildlife tracking, bird language, plant identification, rites of passage, and nature connection to pre-school through primary age children. 

River attended her first AWA workshop at the age of 16. She has returned again and again over the last 25 years to the safe, unique atmosphere of the AWA style to further her own writing and to engage with other writers in a nourishing creative community. She has used the method in elementary classrooms, with at-risk youth, and now as an affiliate through Seattle Writers Circle.

As a workshop leader, she believes in the power of focusing on the individual strengths and voice of each writer to build an active community of writers supporting writers. She brings a deeply sensitive approach to tending creativity for writers of all ages and abilities.