Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the New York Times best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays, WORLD OF WONDERS: IN PRAISE OF FIREFLIES, WHALE SHARKS, & OTHER ASTONISHMENTS, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year and named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. She also wrote four previous poetry collections: OCEANIC, LUCKY FISH, AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO, and MIRACLE FRUIT. With the poet Ross Gay, she co-authored the chapbook LACE & PYRITE, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review.
Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the first-ever poetry editor for SIERRA magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. Nezhukumatathil is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program where she received the faculty’s Distinguished Research and Creative Achievement Award.
NEW! Forthcoming in May 2024 –> BITE BY BITE: NOURISHMENTS AND JAMBOREES (Ecco/Harper Collins), an illustrated essay collection celebrating food– how it can be a locus for care, grief, desire, nostalgia– drawing on research and personal memoir.
Aimee’s extended bio. Photo credit: Tenola Plaxico
How to pronounce my last name? Click below!