Debbie Richard Books in Order

If you want her Appalachian memoir first: Hills of Home
If you want poetry rooted in family and endurance: Resiliency → Pivot
If you like books about place and memory: Hills of Home → Pivot
If you want the fullest picture of her work: Resiliency → Hills of Home → Pivot

Debbie Richard grew up in Appalachia, and that landscape never left her. She was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, spent her early childhood in the rural community of Munday in Wirt County, and later lived near Walton in Roane County during her high school years. Those hills, neighbors, family stories, and everyday routines would become the backbone of her writing.

Richard studied Secretarial Science at West Virginia Career College in Charleston and finished with honors in 1987. As an adult she moved south, drawn by her love of the ocean, and spent years in clerical and report analyst work before writing took up a bigger part of her life. She was a reader long before she was a published author.

She had enjoyed writing since school and had written poems earlier, but 2009 was the real turning point. After leaving a health care job to become a full-time caregiver for her mother, she began writing seriously. What started as expression soon became a way to carry grief, memory, and the pressure of day-to-day life.

Writing became a kind of lifeline.

Her first book, Resiliency, is a chapbook of poems shaped by loss, illness, endurance, nature, and remembrance. Richard has said the book draws on her father's early death, her mother's illness, and the people who marked her life. Even when the subject is heavy, the poems keep looking for steadiness, whether in a garden path, a childhood street, or a small remembered kindness.

That same pull toward memory shapes Hills of Home, her Appalachian memoir. Set against rural West Virginia in the 1950s and after, the book gathers family stories, humor, diary material, and local memory into a portrait of place. Readers often come to it for the porch sitting, county fairs, pranks, and coming-of-age moments, but what stays with them is the feeling of a close community where hardship and generosity live side by side.

Her work is not nostalgic in a soft-focus way. She remembers the fun, but she also keeps the harder parts in view, illness, early loss, economic strain, and the fact that leaving home does not end your connection to it.

Later, in Pivot, Richard returned to poetry and focused on turning points, the moments when a life shifts course and you suddenly see things differently. The collection ranges from domestic scenes to Appalachian memories and picked up an honorable mention from the New York Book Festival in 2019. Her later book Crosswinds continues that interest in inner weather, tension, and the choices people make while trying to stay steady.

Place is one of her main characters.

Across poetry and nonfiction, Richard tends to write about what she knows, family ties, caregiving, grief, faith, rural life, and the stubborn beauty of the natural world. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, and her books have earned recognition too, including a 2019 San Francisco Book Festival runner-up finish for Hills of Home. By late 2025, she was based in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, active in writing groups, and still working in the overlap between memory and feeling.