She grew up wanting to be a nun. Instead, she’s a librarian launching her first book of poetry.
Amy Thatcher is a librarian in Port Richmond who just won a national poetry competition. Her debut book, "Weird Girl", written "for the odd balls" will be published February 2027.
Amy Thatcher is branch manager of Richmond Library, and writes award-winning poems about Rick James and what it’s like being a bit weird. She can’t imagine doing it anywhere but Philly.
Thatcher won the Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize in February, a national competition held by the Ohio State University. As the winner, Thatcher’s manuscript Weird Girl, about growing up with a single mom in 1970s and 80s Philadelphia, will be published by Ohio State University Press next February.
Thatcher’s poems reflect on the strangeness of American girlhood, falling out with her Catholic faith, being awkward but true to herself, and the city of Philadelphia. Despite often feeling out of place, she connects deeply with the city for finding strength in its weirdness and self-assuredness.
“I feel like Philadelphia is in me, it kind of defines who I am. I could never live anywhere else,” she said.
Thank you, Rick James
Thatcher likes to tell people that the singer-songwriter Rick James saved her from the nunnery.
Her early childhood was spent in the city’s Logan section, inside of a heavily Irish Catholic enclave. Everything in her community revolved around the church — her Catholic school, going to Mass, playing with friends afterward.
Thatcher wanted to become a nun, and even the nuns thought that was weird, she said.
One of her poems is about how things changed the day she saw Rick James performing on her family’s black and white TV. She instantly developed a crush on him, which marked the beginning of her disillusionment with religion, making her question the church’s repression of desire.
“He was dancing around in tight leather pants, shirtless with a leather vest. And I started feeling like, ‘Wow, I like boys’,” she said. “Rick James came down and rescued me. I wish he was alive so I could tell him.”
When she was a teenager, Thatcher’s family moved to South Philly, what she remembers as a gritty and dirty neighborhood. Her book includes a poem about a summer in the 80s when kids pretended to be Rambo on the street and a neighbor poured cement on tree roots to protest the city’s push to make things greener.
Thatcher and her friends used to find soda cans and stomp on them so they’d look like high heels, and glue red pistachio shells on their fingers to look like their nails were done.
South Philly has changed, she said, and her family wouldn’t be able to afford living there today.
Despite growing up “by the seat of my pants,” she said her mother drilled the importance of education and the arts to Thatcher and her older sister. There were books in the house and museums to visit, even if they were late on the electric bill.
Thatcher attended Temple University as a first-generation college student, where she relished the chance to read books and poetry. She worked as a server to afford school, and realized that while she detested the job, she liked interacting with people.
She got her master’s degree in library science in New York City, and has been a Philadelphia librarian since she moved back in 2000.
‘For the oddballs’
Thatcher only started writing poetry during the pandemic, after her mother died from COVID. She wrote her first poem about her mother’s death and shared it on Facebook, where one of her poet heroes Diane Seuss read it and asked to publish it in her journal.
Thatcher said she feels like a bit of an impostor having her work published alongside more accomplished poets without formal training.
She assumed the call from the Ohio State contest judge to let her know she’d won was from the mortgage company.
Thatcher writes with humor, but also vulnerability about the feeling of otherness she had from being a girl in former President Ronald Reagan’s America. One of her poems is about an unsettling incident from when she was teenager, where a man driving the neighborhood Mr. Softee ice cream truck kissed her on the mouth in exchange for a free cone.
She described her poetry as being “for the dreamers, the oddballs, the resilient ones who have learned to thrive in their own offbeat light.”
“I feel like oddballs are closer to truth tellers,” she said.
Or in other words, the people of Philadelphia.
“There’s a real bravado in Philadelphia and the people who live here, who are from here. It’s like, we will survive. We’re not going anywhere. Come at me, and you’ll learn a lesson,” she said. “I feel that way about having done this book too. This is my like — ‘screw you.’ It’s a triumph for me."