Aimee Nezhukumatathil


Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an American poet. Nezhukumatathil draws upon her Filipina and Malayali Indian background to give her perspective on love, loss, and land.

Biography

Nezhukumatathil received her B.A. and M.F.A. from 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 Council 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 States, American Poetry Review, FIELD, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, New 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.

Works

;Anthologies