Aimee Nezhukumatathil
NYT Bestselling Nature Writer
Acclaimed Poet
Sought-after School Speaker
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- That Which Rips Your Heart With Joy: A Masterclass on Food Writing
- Dessert First: Writing Food Poems
- Re-learning & Remembering Wonder: A Reckoning
- The Wind Wags its Many Tails: Writing Nature Poetry
- Consider the Penguin: Nature Poetry for Kids
- The Beast in Me: Writing Animal and Invective Poems
- The Edge of the Sea is a Strange and Beautiful Place: Hybrid Poetry & Prose Experiments
- Poem Jump-Starts: a Workshop for High Schoolers
Biography
“Nezhukumatathil speaks with resonance and fierceness.” —Publishers Weekly
“Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poems are as ripe, funny, and fresh as a precious friendship. They’re the fullness of days, deliciously woven of heart and verve….Poems like these revive our souls.” —Naomi Shihab Nye
“Nezhukumatathil’s poems contain elegant twists of a very sharp knife. She writes about the natural world and how we live in it, filling each poem, each page with a true sense of wonder.”—Roxane Gay
Born to a Filipino mother and Malayali Indian father, Aimee Nezhukumatathil (neh-ZOO / koo-mah / tah-TILL) is the author of four books of poetry: Oceanic (Copper Canyon 2018); Lucky Fish (2011), winner of the Hoffer Grand Prize for Prose and Independent Books; At the Drive-In Volcano (2007); and Miracle Fruit (2003), all from Tupelo Press. With Ross Gay, she co-authored Lace & Pyrite (Organic Weapon Arts, 2014), a chapbook of nature poems. She is also the author of the collection of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (Milkweed, 2020), which was Barnes and Nobles 2022 Book of the Year. Most recently, she authored her second essay collection, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees (Ecco, 2024), which explores the way food and drink evokes our associations and remembrances – a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia.
Lucky Fish won the gold medal in Poetry for the Independent Publishers Book Awards and was featured in the New York Times and on the PBS NewsHour ArtsBeat. Poems from this collection were also awarded an NEA Fellowship in poetry, the Glenna Luschia Prize from Prairie Schooner, and the Angoff Award from The Literary Review for the best poems appearing that volume year. At the Drive-In Volcano was named winner of the Balcones Prize, which honors an outstanding collection published the previous year. Her first collection of poetry, Miracle Fruit, was selected by Gregory Orr for the Tupelo Press Prize and was the winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award in poetry, the Global Filipino Literary Award. Other awards for her writing include the Pushcart Prize, a poetry fellowship to the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah, and the Richard Hugo Prize from Poetry Northwest.
World of Wonders, Nezhukumatathil’s first nonfiction book, is an illustrated collection of nature essays told in the context of her unusual childhood growing up on the grounds of mental institutions in rural America and navigating the parent-push towards science while finding herself drawn toward language—all unfolding through detailed and delightful observations about the oddities and fascinations of our planet. Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy. Author Kiese Laymon says the collection is, “the first book to make me feel like a firefly as much as it reminds me I’m still a black boy playing in Central Mississippi woods. The book walks. It sprints. It leaps. Most importantly, the book lingers in a world where power, people, and the literal outside wrestle painfully, beautifully. This book is a world of wonders. This book is about to shake the Earth.”
Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Quarterly West, New England Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and Tin House. Poems and essays have been widely anthologized in such venues as The Best American Poetry series, Billy Collins’ second edition of Random House’s Poetry 180: A Poem a Day and Language for a New Century: Contemporary Asian American Poetry from W.W. Norton. A number of essays and poems have also been published in several high school AP English textbooks and college textbooks.
Nezhukumatathil is known for her dynamic and joy-filled teaching. Equally at ease in a university or high school classroom, she often serves as a poetry “ambassador,” bringing the delights and joys of reading and writing poetry to classrooms all over the country. She has twice served as a faculty member for the Kundiman Asian American Writers’ Retreat. Her books are widely adopted for high schools, colleges, and universities as part of contemporary poetry, women’s studies, and Asian-American literature classes; and she has been a featured reader at over a hundred venues across the globe from Amsterdam to Singapore.
Nezhukumatathil is a professor of English and teaches environmental literature and poetry writing in the MFA program of the University of Mississippi.
Short Bio
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the book of food essays Bite By Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees and the New York Times best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments. She also wrote four previous poetry collections including Oceanic. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She is poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
Visit Author WebsiteVideos
Publications
Bite By Bite
Food, 2024
In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evokes our associations and remembrances – a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia.
Here, Nezhukumatathil restores some of our astonishment and wonder about food through her encounter with a range of foods and food traditions. From shave ice to lumpia, mangoes to pecans, rambutan to vanilla, she investigates how food marks our experiences and identities; the boundaries between heritage and memory; and the ethics and environmental pressures around gathering and consuming food.
Bite by Bite offers a rich and textured kaleidoscope of vignettes and visions into the world of food and nature, drawn together by intimate and funny personal reflections and Fumi Nakamura’s gorgeous imagery and illustration.
Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens
Poetry, 2022
Originally published by Organic Weapon Arts in 2014, Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens captures seasonal changes and life unfolding from the perspective of two gardens: Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. What began as an unprompted poem correspondence between the two poets in the late July swelter of 2011 blossomed into a beautiful collection of epistolary poetry.
This reprint of Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens by Get Fresh Books Publishing comprises all of its original poetry and includes an interview published by The Margins titled, “Our Wholeness, Our Togetherness: A Conversation with Aimee Nezhukumatathil & Ross Gay.”
World Of Wonders
Essay, 2020
“World of Wonders walks. It sprints. It leaps. Most importantly, the book lingers in a world where power, people, and the literal outside wrestle painfully, beautifully.” —Kiese Laymon
The author of this essay collection has called many places home: Kansas, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she’s been transplanted, she has always been able to turn to the fierce and funny creatures around her for guidance.
Oceanic
Poetry, 2018
“Cultural strands are woven into the DNA of her strange, lush, but oh-so-American poems. Aphorisms . . . from another dimension.” ―New York Times
With inquisitive flair, Aimee Nezhukumatathil creates a thorough registry of the earth’s wonderful and terrible magic. In her fourth collection of poetry, she studies forms of love as diverse and abundant as the ocean itself. She brings to life a father penguin, a C-section scar, and the Niagara Falls with a powerful force of reverence for life and living things. With an encyclopedic range of subjects and unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the earth, an extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong.
From “Starfish and Coffee”
And that’s how you feel after tumbling
like sea stars on the ocean floor over each other.
A night where it doesn’t matter
which are arms or which are legs
or what radiates and how―
only your centers stuck together.
Lucky Fish
Poetry, 2011
Lucky Fish travels along a lush current—a confluence of leaping vocabulary and startling formal variety, with upwelling gratitude at its source: for love, motherhood, “new hope,” and the fluid and rich possibilities of words themselves. With an exuberant appetite for “my morning song, my scurry-step, my dew,” anchored in complicated human situations, this astounding young poet’s third collection of poems is her strongest yet.
At The Drive-in Volcano
Poetry, 2007
In At the Drive-In Volcano Aimee Nezhukumatathil examines the full circle journey of desire; loss; and, ultimately; an exuberant love—traveling around a world brimming with wild and delicious offerings such as iced waterfalls, jackfruit, and pistol shrimp. From the tropical landscapes of the Caribbean, India, and the Philippines to the deep winters of western New York and mild autumns of Ohio, the natural world Nezhukumatathil describes is dark but also lovely—so full of enchantment and magic. Here, worms glow in the dark, lizards speak, the most delicious soup in the world turns out to be deadly, and a woman eats soil as if it were candy. Her trademark charm, verve, and wit remain elemental and a delight to behold, even in the face of a crumbling relationship. These poems confront delicate subjects of love and loss with an exacting exuberance and elegance not hardly seen in a writer so young.
Miracle Fruit
Poetry, 2003
As three worlds collide, a mother’s Philippines, a father’s India, and the poet’s contemporary America, the resulting impressions are chronicled in this collection of incisive and penetrating verse. The writer weaves her words carefully into wise and affecting embroidery that celebrates the senses while remaining down-to-earth and genuine.
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• Some of the Most Influential Asian American Literature of All Time – Bookriot
• World of Wonders lands the New York Times’ Bestsellers in Nonfiction – New York Times
• The Barnes and Noble Book of the Year is World of Wonders – Barnes and Noble
• Q&A with Aimee Nezhukumatathil – Poets & Writers
• Aimee Nezhukumatathil Named Guggenheim Fellow – Jackson Free Press
• Review of Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil – Rhino Poetry
• Putting Herself in the Story – The Oracle
• Michaelsun Knapp interviews Aimee Nezhukumatathil — Mud City Journal
• “I’m Not Sorry to Write about Wonder & Joy” Interview — Divedapper.com
• Review of Lucky Fish — Orion Magazine
• A Conversation with Aimee Nezhukumatathil by Roxane Gay — HTMLGiant
• Interview with Aimee Nezhukumatathil — Katonah Poetry
• Interview with Aimee Nezhukumatathil — The Journal
• How a Poem Happens with Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Listen to Audio
• Aimee Nezhukumatathil with Kawai Strong Washburn – Oregon Public Broadcasting
• How words and poems can help to connect us to the natural world – KCRW
• “Suppose You Were a Moray Eel” — Orion Magazine
Selected Writings
Read the poem “The Body” — Buzzfeed
ECLIPSE
for Pascal
She’s been warned not to sleep with moonlight
on her face or she will be taken from her house.
She wears eel-skin to protect herself. She tilts
her face to the night sky when no one is looking.
During the eclipse, eels bubble in their dark
and secret caves. Toads frenzy in pastures
just outside of town, surrounding the dumb cows
in a wet mess of croak and sizzle. Years later,
she would touch the hand of a green-eyed man
by the weird light. Because of him, she plants
a moon garden: freesia, snowdrops, fotherfilla,
bugbane. She is a runner-bean, stretching best
and brilliant in this light. Their child is moon-faced.
She is crazy about them. She is lunatic. She
is taken. She is a hymn book flipped open.
—from Lucky Fish
WHEN WEAVER ANTS CUT (A VALENTINE)
I love the dance of every one helping.
Each ant chews and chews a bit of juicy leaf
and stands on his back four legs to raise
the leaf shape up high above his head.
The congo line-a honey shimmer of bodies
rushing to bring the cut leaf home. For twelve
years, the ruler of Garwara, India was a jackal.
All the laughing in that town cannot
compare to what you have brought
into my home: a filament of light inside
a dark jellyfish bell. It’s this dance of ants
down a tree, around a stubborn frog-I want
to dance with you-how brave the line,
how tiny the step, a hundred green valentines.
—from At the Drive-In Volcano