Amy Butcher is the author of Mothertrucker and Visiting Hours, a 2015 memoir that earned starred reviews and praise from the New York Times Sunday Review of Books, NPR, the Star Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and others. Her work was awarded the grand prize in the Solas Awards' "Best of Travel Writing" series, selected for inclusion in Best Travel Writing 2016 and Best American Essays 2015, and was awarded the grand prize in the 2014 Iowa Review Award in nonfiction.

Her op-ed, "Emoji Feminism," published in the New York Times Sunday Review, inspired Google to create thirteen new female-empowered emojis, due out later this year. Additional work has appeared in the New York Times, the Iowa Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, the Rumpus, the Paris Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is a recent recipient of Colgate University's Olive B. O'Connor Creative Writing fellowship, as well as grants and awards from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, Word Riot Inc., and the Stanley Foundation for International Research. She currently teaches creative writing at Ohio Wesleyan University and annually at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska.

“To Iowa I owe the best and most engaging three years of my life. What else to say of a place where one can spend three sunlit hours at a table beside Meghan Daum, listen to Donovan Hohn consider the editorial merits of your magazine pitch, and decorate cupcakes in a contest in a contest judged by Wayne Koestenbaum? Once, in the dead of a particularly excessive Iowa winter, I trudged two miles through the snow uphill—this is not in any way hyperbolic—following an email invitation for roasted lamb shank, red wine and a reading of Didion by candlelight. The electricity had gone out, the invitation asserted; what else could one do?

"This is what it is to be enrolled in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa: far beyond the classes and the time and the mentors, all of which are exceptional, to be a student in this program is to be a singular unit in a collection of people who love nothing more than to celebrate and converse the origins, merits, and theoretical implications of the literary essay. I arrived knowing only that I loved David Sedaris and with the draft of a ‘true story’ I’d written on my summer job folding jeans at the local mall; I left with a foundational understanding of a genre richly steeped in history and literary tradition and an approach to writing and revising work that I now share with my own nonfiction students. And the town this program is in? I feared isolation and social remove; years later, I now return every summer, for no place that I’ve yet seen is as intimate and amenable than Iowa City. There are sleepy alleys ideal for rumination and nature preserves that glow under summer’s orange dusk. There are readings staged on a platform set against the woods. There are barbecues and croquet and yes, even football. In truth, there is no better choice I have ever made for myself than to spend those three years, and to it I owe the best years of my life and everything good that has happened since.”