Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil was born in Chicago to a Filipina mother and South Indian father. She earned her BA and MFA from the Ohio State University and was a Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Miracle Fruit (2003), winner of the ForeWord Magazine Poetry Book of the Year and the Global Filipino Literary Award; At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize; Lucky Fish (2011); and Oceanic (2018). A book of illustrated nature essays, World of Wonder, is forthcoming from Milkweed. With Ross Gay she co-wrote the chapbook of epistolary nature poems, Lace and Pyrite (2014).

Nezhukumatathil's work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Ploughshares, FIELD, and American Poetry Review. She is poetry editor of Orion magazine. Her honors and awards include a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Angoff Award, the Boatwright Prize, the Richard Hugo Prize, an Intro Award in Creative Non-Fiction from the Associated Writing Programs, and fellowships to the MacDowell Colony. She was the 2016-17 Grisham writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi, where she is currently professor of English in the MFA program. She lives with her husband and sons in Oxford, Mississippi.