M. C. Richards

Author, potter, and professor M.C. Richards was born in Weiser, Idaho, in 1916. She grew up in Portland, Oregon and earned a BA from Reed College. She continued her education at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her MA and PhD, and wrote her dissertation on irony in Thomas Hardy. Richards published several, often interdisciplinary books, including Opening Our Moral Eye: Essays, Talks, and poems Embracing Creativity and Community (1996), Imagine Inventing Yellow: New and Selected Poems (1991), and Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person (1964).

Richards traveled and taught widely during her career. She joined the faculty of the English Department at Black Mountain College in 1945, where she taught writing, studied pottery and dance, as well as produced and translated (when necessary) plays by Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, and W.B. Yeats. During this time she published her first volume of poetry, Poems (1948), and was among the Black Mountain poets who participated in John Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1.

After moving to New York’s Greenwich Village, she continued to study poetry and began giving workshops in the early 1960s, where continued synthesizing the ideas she articulated in Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person. She was awarded the Holy Names Medal from Fort Wright College in 1974, and was made a fellow of the Collegium of American Craftspersons of the American Crafts Council in 1976. Richards’s longest teaching affiliation was with University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, California from 1986 until the time of her death in 1999.