Poet and Essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Andie Petkus / OPB
To close out the celebration of National Poetry Month, this episode features poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil at the final event of the 2023-24 season of Portland Arts & Lectures.
Nezhukumatathil is an accomplished poet: Literally every one of her four published poetry collections is prize-winning, and she is the first-ever poetry editor of Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of the Sierra Club.
In 2020, she turned to prose with a book of essays, “World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments,” which combines personal memoir with reflections on the natural world. “World of Wonders” was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction and was named Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year. It’s one of those books that will change the way that you see the world around you – the animals, the plants, and the human animals. And who could argue against approaching our own lives, and the lives of others, with a little more wonder?
“The San Francisco Chronicle” wrote, “The nature writing we have been exposed to has been overwhelmingly male and white, which is just one reason that Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s latest essay collection is a breath of fresh air. What makes her work shine is its joyful embrace of difference, revealing that true beauty resides only in diversity.”
The lecture is followed by an audience Q&A moderated by Amanda Bullock, Literary Arts’s Senior Artistic Director.
Nezhukumatathil will publish a new essay collection, “Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Other Jamborees,” on April 30, 2024.
Bio:
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.