Literary Arts is thrilled to present Aimee Nezhukumatathil as our last event of the 2023/24 Portland Arts & Lectures Series on April 18, 2024. A limited number of single tickets are available for this event! We will announce our 2024/25 season lineup—our 40th anniversary season!—live at the event.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a poet, professor, essayist, and author of seven books, including World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, a New York Times bestseller, Barnes and Noble Book of the Year, and an NPR Best Book of 2020. Nezhukumatatil was named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Angoff Award, and the Boatwright Prize in addition to several fellowships. Her writing has appeared twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Plougshares, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review. Nezhukumatatil became one of the country’s youngest poets to become a full Professor of English, and currently teaches environmental literature and poetry writing at the University of Mississippi.
Readings from World of Wonders:
“I’m hoping to open up more of a conversation about whose outdoor experiences get to be told,” she says. “And I’m hoping that it increases the sense of wonderment when you see that you don’t have to be a scientist to appreciate the outdoors as well.”
From an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition.
“It’s a heck of a thing to grow up without seeing anyone who looked like you even smile in a movie, music video, or TV show. It certainly didn’t appear in any of the books I was taught or found in my libraries (and I was a voracious reader who was searching for it!). I think of that anytime I get nervous or worried that expressing joy or wonder in a poem might not be so-called “poem material,” I think of that when I’m asked for a “serious” (i.e. non-smiling) author photo and I refuse, I think of that anytime I crack a goofy joke at a reading.”
– Aimee Nezhukumatathil speaking with Ross Gay for The Margins.
Author Aimee Nezhukumatathil talks to NPT host J.T. Ellison about World of Wonders:
“Even as a little kid, I tried to make sense of myself and the world around me through the language of the outdoor. I felt good and safe in the outdoors, and it was only other humans that made me feel like I didn’t have words. I always say Mother Nature is the greatest poet—I’m just trying to take notes.”
From an interview with porter house review
Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Poets on Poetry (for poets.org):
FULL BIO:
Aimee Nezhukumatathil was born in 1974 in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of a Filipina mother and a father from South India. As a child Nezhukumatathil moved around the country, living in a handful of states, often being the new kid in mostly white schools. Because the garden was her parent’s “main love language” Nezhukumatathil spent a lot of time outside and developed her own life-long love of the outdoors, which shows up often in her poetry.
Nezhukumatathil said she came into poetry relatively late compared to her peers in an interview with Andrew Kuhn for his book How a Poem Can Happen, “I never knew there were living poets until my junior year of college.” Nezhukumatathil began her academic career in a completely different field of study, majoring in chemistry. Her love of the sciences stayed with her through her switch to studying English, “I still have a deep love of the languages of the sciences, the musicality of names of flora and fauna…Even various elements and molecules have a musicality to their names.” After earning her BA of English in 1996 Nezhukumatathil went on to receive her MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from The Ohio State University in 2000.
Nezhukumatathil began publishing her work in 2003 and her first book of poetry, Miracle Fruit, won the Tupelo Press Judge’s Prize, ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year award, the Global Filipino Award, and was a finalist for The Glasgow Prize and the Asian American Literary Award. A Judge’s citation for Miracle Fruit praised it by saying “Every line is alive with the excitement of what can be known about the world, every poem bursting with an eagerness to share it.” Over the next 18 years, Nezhukumatathil published several more books of poetry: At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), Lucky Fish (2011),and Oceanic (2018).
In 2014, Nezhukumatathil collaborated with her friend and fellow poet, Ross Gay, on a poetry chapbook titled Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens. Nezhukumatathil and Gay both draw on the natural world for inspiration and wrote in the book’s introduction, “Our collaborative chapbook, Lace & Pyrite is how we made sense and record of a full year from our respective gardens.” In a conversation with Gay for The Margins, Nezhukumatathil revealed that their collaboration encouraged a vulnerability in her, allowing her to broach subjects in her poetry that she hadn’t written about before.
In 2020 Nezhukumatathil published a collection of essays titled World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments. The collection became a New York Times Bestseller and a Kirkus Prize Finalist for Nonfiction, won Barnes and Noble Book of the Year and NPR Best Book of 2020. In an interview Nezhukumatathil told Gay that at heart the book feels like a love letter to her parents, “And also perhaps a long apology and some kind of way from them to know I was listening and observing, even if it didn’t seem like I was interested in what they had to teach me all the time.”
After being awarded the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at UW-Madison, Nezhukumatathil spent fourteen years teaching at SUNY in Fredonia, New York. She became one of the country’s youngest poets to achieve the rank of full professor of English in 2014. Nezhukumatathil’s books have been adopted for high school and university level academic institutions as part of contemporary poetry, environmental studies, women’s studies, and Asian-American literature classes.
In addition to Nezhukumatathil’s poetry and teaching she was named Sierra magazines first-ever poetry editor in 2021. She also serves on the advisory board or as a contributing editor for a varity of publications, including Poets & Writers Magazine, Orion, Terrain.org, BOA Editions, Kundiman, and the Poetry Center at Passaic Community College.
She was awarded the Grisham Writer-in-Residence in the Universoty of Mississippi’s MFA program in 2016-17, a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, the Angoff Award from The Literary Review, the Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah, the Richard Hugo Prize from Poetry Northwest, fellowships from MacDowell and the Mississippi Arts Commission, and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry in 2020.
Nezhukumatathil’s newest collection of essays, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees, is expected to be released April 30, 2024. Dominican-American poet and writer Elizabeth Acevedo praised it saying, “Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Bite by Bite is an intimate invitation to come sit at her table; each essay is studded with richly rendered traditions and unexpected anecdotes that range from tender to downright devastating. A feast of a collection.”
Nezhukumatathil currently works as a professor of English teaching environmental literature and poetry at the MFA program at University of Mississippi. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi with her husband, writer Dustin Parsons, and their two sons.
