Thanks for the suggestion Mo_

Because I'm cross-compiling, I needed to use the TOOLCHAIN_TARGET_TASK. Also, the application that I was developing needed the static library, so I needed to find in the Yocto build where the static libraries were being built.

Searching through the build history for the sysroot of interest (in my case riscv64-oe-linux), I found all of the related packages that were built as a result of adding openssl to my yocto build. Digging in further, I found that the static libs are built as part of openssl-staticdev.

So in summary, I needed to add the following TOOLCHAIN_TARGET_TASK:append = " openssl-staticdev"

Thanks again