Samantha Ratcliffe is committed to expanding access to free and enriching community writing spaces. With experience teaching English at both the high school and undergraduate levels, she considers herself a lifelong learner with a deep passion for poetry, writing, and small press publishing. She believes that art fosters empathy and has made it her mission to promote creative accessibility throughout the Commonwealth.

 

Ratcliffe's contributions have been recognized in various anthologies and journals:

​2025 King Library Press Broadside contest winner 
2025 Oak Ledge Residency winner, Hindman Settlement School

Flash Fiction

• White Wall Review, Issue 41 — “In Sight It Must Be Right”

• White Wall Review, Issue 41 — “Mary Jane Watson Requests One More Day”
   

Poetry

• “birch rot”; “the holler baby sent you another letter and it’s best you reply.” Rooted, Resilient, Rising Anthology. University Press of Kentucky. Forthcoming.

• “Ars Poetica.” Chaffin/Kash Poetry Contest, Kentucky State Poetry Society. 2025 Non-Ranking Finalist.

• “what we keep”; “Last American New Year.” Testament Anthology. Backwoods Press. Forthcoming.

• “Alive.” All Else Pales 2: A Song, Emerging / Poems About Our Earth.

• “It’s Still Good”; “Love Me Not”; “Southern Hunger”; “Southern Thirst.” Discarded: A Rural Anthology.

• “Overthrust.” Pegasus. Kentucky State Poetry Society. Forthcoming.

• “Rot.” Pegasus. Kentucky State Poetry Society.

• “US, Dreaming.” These Mosaics Anthology. Hindman Settlement School.

• “Holler Timing.” Untelling, Issue 1.

• “Shuck White New Year”; “Manual on How to Cry.” Untelling, Issue 3.

• “Problem Child”; “We Wear.” Yearling, Issue 3.

• “Commonwealth.” Yearling, Issue 4. Forthcoming.

• “Two Days Sat Up Like a Baby Doll.” Yearling, Issue 5. Forthcoming.

 

Born and raised in Pikeville, Kentucky, Samantha Ratcliffe grew up surrounded by song. In a family where music was both inheritance and language, she learned to play in bluegrass circles and performed often with her family’s gospel band. By high school, she was publishing handmade zines and carving out a voice as a folk punk musician. Nearly twenty years later, her writing and music continue to echo across Kentucky, carrying forward the traditions that first shaped her.

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Ratcliffe is currently completing her debut full-length poetry collection, Common Wealth, a hybrid work that weaves surrealist flash fiction and poetry into a meditation on invisibility, poverty, and the erosion of environmental agency amid political unrest. The collection offers an intimate portrait of queer and trans life in Appalachia, asking what it means to share, to endure, and to belong. Ultimately, Common Wealth insists that true wealth is not material but communal, that it lives in the heart of the progressive South, and that our shared future depends on a collective commitment to justice, equity, and care for the land that holds us.