Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the New York Times best-selling book of illustrated nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments (2020, Milkweed Editions), finalist for the Kirkus Prize in nonfiction and named Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award; Lucky Fish (2011) winner of the gold medal for the Independent Publisher Book Awards; At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize; and Miracle Fruit (2003), winner of the Tupelo Press Prize, ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award, the Global Filipino Award, and a finalist for The Glasgow Prize and the Asian American Literary Award. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary nature poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her most recent collection of essays Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees (2024) explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances—a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia. Reading her work reminds us of the joy and wonder that fills the world if we take the time to acknowledge our senses. 

Awards include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, the Angoff Award from The Literary Review, the Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah, The Richard Hugo Prize from Poetry Northwest, and fellowships from the MacDowell Arts Colony and the Mississippi Arts Council. In 2020, she was named a Guggenheim fellow in poetry. 

Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club, named her the first-ever poetry editor of the magazine in 2021. She is professor of English and teaches environmental literature and poetry writing in the MFA program of the University of Mississippi and lives in Oxford, MS, with her husband, the writer Dustin Parsons, and their two young sons.