Amy Woolard is an attorney and chief program officer for the ACLU of Virginia, where she supervises and directs the work of the affiliate’s Legal, Policy and Organizing teams. She has two decades of experience in integrated advocacy, administrative and legislative advocacy, policy research and writing, and coalition-building around a wide variety of civil rights, civil liberties, racial justice and economic justice issues. She has also directly represented youth clients in education, foster care and juvenile court matters.
Prior to her role at ACLU-VA, she spent 10 years with the Legal Aid Justice Center as an attorney and policy director, and co-taught the Law School’s Youth Advocacy Clinic. She also spent five years with Voices for Virginia’s children as senior policy counsel, working primarily on legal and policy advocacy in criminal legal reform and youth justice initiatives in Virginia. She was appointed by Govs. Terry McAuliffe and Ralph Northam to the Virginia Advisory Committee on Juvenile Justice and Prevention, and she is also a longtime member of the Virginia Bar Association’s Commission on the Needs of Children. In 2022, Virginia Lawyers Weekly named her one of their “Influential Women of Law.” While at the Law School, she was awarded the Lewis F. Powell Fellowship in Legal Services and the Caplin Public Service Center Pro Bono Award, among other honors.
Her debut poetry collection, “NECK OF THE WOODS,” received the Alice James Award and was published in April 2020 by Alice James Books. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Atlantic and Poetry, among others, while her essays and reporting have been featured in Slate, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference and the Cork International Poetry Festival.