Chelsea Woodard's third collection, At the Lepidopterist's House, won the 2022 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and was released from Southern Indiana Review Press in October, 2023. She is also the author of the collections Solitary Bee (Measure Press, 2016) and Vellum (Able Muse Press, 2014). Her work is also included in the recent anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). She is the recipient of the 2024 Peter Heinegg Literary Award from Union College, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a residency at Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

Other poems by Chelsea Woodard in Verse Daily:
October 19, 2014:   "Finding the Porn Magazines" "The way a twelve-year-old will hide her want..."

Other poems on the web by Chelsea Woodard:
"Coyote"
Two poems
"The Flower Press"
Seven poems

Chelsea Woodard's Website.

About At the Lepidopterist's House:

"In her third collection of poetry, Chelsea Woodard's gifts are in full bloom. Her dexterity with rhyme, rhythm, and tactile animal and mineral imagery recalls Sylvia Plath's most formidable and monumental poems of memorial. Woodard's craft is, in fact, so polished here as to be almost transparent, showcasing a richness of heartfelt tender emotion, a quietly melancholy awareness of the bodily frailty and transience that defines our shared humanity. Her blend of sophisticated technique and deeply affecting poignancy proves that, like the goddess Eris's apples, verse can be outwardly 'golden and sweet' and yet remain challengingly complex and multidimensional; the poems in this book are at once artfully formed and appealingly free from 'the gnarled grip // of manners.'"
—Jenna Le

"Each of the poems in Chelsea Woodard's At the Lepidopterist's House is crafted with subtle skill, with a keen awareness of the etymologies and sounds folded into the vast resource of the English language. The book has a wholeness and rightness of shape that can only come with thoughtful artifice. What makes her work deeply pleasing, too, is that we see artifice applied so often and so well to the natural world of flora and fauna. To read Woodard on Nabokov's favorite being, the butterfly, but also on the humble hedgehog, is to feel more fully alive. Woodard is a poet who brings out in us both the joy and the pain of human attachment, and of attachment to the world beyond the human."
—Mary Jo Salter

"'There's always more to know / about the world,' Chelsea Woodard insists in her stunning new collection, At the Lepidopterist's House. A poet 'tasked to visualize / a form,' she makes use of a formidable knowledge of craft and a finely attuned ear to offer the pleasures of 'a voice holding / the true expression of its shape,' whether her subjects are illness, book mites, an exhibitionist, an imaginary bird, or the bodies of two women found within a ship in a Viking burial mound. If Woodard in her poems acknowledges, however subtly, several forebears, including Dickinson, Yeats, and Bishop, she also assumes her rightful place among our new century's voices to 'sing // to hear the heaviness of sound / falling, to watch its fullness swell / and drop like rain.'"
—Michael Waters