Aimee Nezhukumatathil 

Aimee Nezhukumatathil (/ˈeɪmi nəˌzukuməˈtɒtɪl/; born in Chicago, Illinois) is an American poet. Nezhukumatathil draws upon her Filipina and Malayali Indian background to give her perspective on love, loss, and land.

Nezhukumatathil received her BA and MFA from the Ohio State University. In 2016–17 she was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi's MFA program. She has also taught at the Kundiman Retreat for Asian-American writers. She is professor of English in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.

She is author of four poetry collections. Her first collection, Miracle Fruit, won the 2003 Tupelo Press Prize and the Global Filipino Literary Award in Poetry, was named the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year in Poetry, and was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and the Glasgow Prize. Her second, At the Drive-In Volcano, won the 2007 Balcones Poetry Prize. With Ross Gay, in 2014 she co-authored the epistolary nature chapbook, Lace & Pyrite. Her most recent book of poetry, Oceanic, was published in 2018 by Copper Canyon Press and won the 2019 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for poetry.

Among Nezhukumatathil's awards are a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, a Mississippi Arts Commission Fellowship grant, inclusion in the Best American Poetry series, a 2009 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in poetry, and a Pushcart Prize for the poem "Love in the Orangery". Her poems and essays have appeared in New Voices: Contemporary Poetry from the United StatesThe American Poetry ReviewFIELDPrairie SchoonerPoetryNew England Review, and Tin House. Nezhukumatathil serves as poetry editor for Orion magazine.

She is married to the writer Dustin Parsons. They live in Oxford, Mississippi, with their two sons.

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

A professor of English and creative writing uses her craft to illuminate the natural world and a handful of the joys and oddities it contains. Time and again, the critters she discovers manage to illuminate human life and some of the challenges that pop up as we come of age.  


Bio information sourced from Wikipedia