Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She is the author of several poetry collections, including "Lucky Fish" and "Oceanic," which explore themes of nature, family, and the Filipino and Indian diaspora. She has also written essays and reviews for publications such as The New York Times, Tin House, and The Nation. Nezhukumatathil has received numerous honors for her writing, including the Pushcart Prize, the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the State University of New York at Fredonia.

Her first collection, Miracle Fruit, won the 2003 Tupelo Press Prize and the Global Filipino Literary Award in Poetry. In addition, she 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.

Oceanic was published in 2018 and won the 2019 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for poetry. She is also the author of the New York Times bestselling book of essays World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, which was published in 2020 by Milkweed Editions and was a Barnes & Noble Book of the Year, as well as an NPR 2020 Best Book of the Year.

Of her process, Nezhukumatathil has stated: "I never set out to write a book—even after four books, I still find that prospect daunting. So instead, I focus on the individual poems, getting those done week after week. And sometimes some quiet times in between too."

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 States, The American Poetry Review, FIELD, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, New England Review, and Tin House. In addition, Nezhukumatathil serves as poetry editor for Orion magazine.