Roses are red, violets are blue?

Asian American Poetry

Aimee Nezhukumatathi

Aimee Nezhukumatathil was born in Chicago, IL to a Filipina mother and a South Indian father. She attended The Ohio State University (go Bucks!) where she received her B.A. in English and her M.F.A. in poetry and creative non-fiction. Aimee was the 2000-01 Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at UW-Madison and is now associate professor of English at State University of New York-Fredonia, where she teaches creative writing and environmental literature.

She is the author of At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize which honors the most outstanding book of poetry each year, and Miracle Fruit (2003), which won Foreword Magazine's Poetry Book of the Year Award and was chosen by poet Gregory Orr for the Tupelo Press First Book Prize. Miracle Fruit was also named co-winner of the Global Filipino Literary Award, and finalist for The Glasgow Prize , and the Asian American Literary Award in poetry. Her first chapbook, Fishbone (2000), won the Snail's Pace Press Prize.

Other awards for her writing include an NEA grant, the Pushcart Prize, the Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah, The Richard Hugo Prize from Poetry Northwest, an Associated Writing Programs Intro Award in creative non-fiction, and fellowships to the MacDowell Arts Colony. Her poems are anthologized in Language for a New Century (WW Norton); Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford St. Martin's); 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Everyday (HarperCollins); New Voices: Contemporary Poetry from The United States (Irish Pages); 60 Indian Poets (Penguin); Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, God, War, Art, Sex, Death, Madness, and Everything Else (Univ. of Georgia); Beacon Best Writing of 2000; Babaylan: Filipina and Filipina-American Writing; Humor Me: An Anthology of Humor Writing; Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation; and Eros Pinoy.

Poems and essays are published or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, FIELD, The Antioch Review, New England Review, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Chelsea, Mid-American Review, The Southeast Review, River Styx, Beloit Poetry Journal, Quarterly West, Crab Orchard Review, Virginia Quarterly, Slate, and North American Review.

Aimee was named the SUNY-Fredonia's Hagan Scholar in 2005 for a junior faculty member with distinguished scholarship-- the 1st time a member of the SUNY-Fredonia English Department has won this award. In April of 2006, she also received the SUNY's Drescher Award and SUNY-wide Chancellor's Award for Scholarship and Creative Activities for excellence in her record of publications, art production and performance.

She is working on a collection of nature essays and her third collection of poems. She lives in Western NY with her husband, son, and their geriatric dachshund, Villanelle. As of Fall 2008, she is on sabbatical and will return to teaching in Jan 2009.

**INFO from http://aimeenez.net/page2.html

-Angel