Amanda’s writing has appeared in North American Review, Indiana Review, Sierra, Orion Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, Aeon Magazine, Fourth Genre, The Magazine, Imagination & Place: Cartography, Flyway, Terrain, and Passages North, among others. She is a 2022 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Artist Fellowship in Nonfiction. Her work has twice been selected as “notable” in Best American Essays (2015 and 2016), once in Best American Sports Writing (2016),  and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Amanda has received support from Playa Fellowship Residency Program, University of Pittsburgh’s Nationality Room Scholarships, and the Berkshire-Taconic Community Foundation.

From 2013 to 2019 she was a professor of writing in SUNY Albany’s Writing and Critical Inquiry Program, a first-year writing program that functions on the philosophy that writing is a vehicle for meaning-making. She introduced students to personal essay, analysis, and academic research, and taught a variety of assignments to prepare students for university writing and beyond. Before that, she received her MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Pittsburgh, where she taught Introduction to Journalism and Nonfiction and Seminar in Composition. She also has an MA in English from Northern Michigan University and a BA in Environmental Studies and Creative Writing from Prescott College. She helped to found and served as an editor for Vela Magazine from 2011 to 2016, and has served as an editor for the literary journals Passages North, Hot Metal Bridge, and Alligator Juniper. 

Amanda left teaching in early 2020 to spend more time on her own writing and raising her daughter. She lives in Berkshire County of western Massachusetts with her husband, daughter, and chickens and works part time as a Grants & Communications Coordinator for the local nonprofit, The Literacy Network of South Berkshire.

Email Amanda at AmandaGiracca@yahoo.com.