Aimee Nezhukumatathil Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Poetry Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Aimee Nezhukumatathil was born in Chicago, Illinois to a dad from South India and a Filipina mom. She went to The Ohio State University where she got her MFA in creative non fiction and poetry and her BA in English and then was awarded the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at UW-Madison.

Aimee, after she taught in western New York for fifteen years, was awarded the Grisham Writer-in-Residence in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program for 2016-17.

She is known for her joy-filled and dynamic teaching. Equally at ease in a high school or university classroom, she often serves as a poetry “ambassador”, bringing all the joys and delights of writing poetry and reading to classrooms all around the country.

She never sets out to write a book, even after having multiple published. She still finds such a process so daunting. Rather, she tries to focus on the poems individually, getting those done one week after the next.

Aimee’s writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, ESPN, The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, Georgia Review, and TriQuarterly. Her essays and poems have been widely anthologized in places like “They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing”, Best American Poetry (2015 and 2018), and “Dear America: Letters of Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy” as well as others.

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

“Miracle Fruit” is a poetry collection that was released in 2003. While three worlds collide, a dad’s India, a mom’s Philippines, and the poet’s contemporary America, the impressions that are the result are chronicled here in this collection of penetrating and incisive verse.

Aimee weaves her words carefully into a wise and affecting embroidery which celebrates the senses as she remains genuine and down-to-earth.

“Miracle Fruit” won the ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award, Tupelo Press Prize, the Global Filipino Award, and was a finalist for The Glasgow Prize and the Asian American Literary Award.

“At the Drive-In Volcano” is a poetry collection that was released in 2007. Aimee examines the full circle journey of loss, desire, and ultimately, an exuberant lovetraveling around a world that’s brimming with delicious and wild offerings like jackfruit, iced waterfalls, and pistol shrimp.

From the tropical landscapes of India, the Philippines, and the Caribbean and on to the deep winters in west New York and the more mild autumns of Ohio. The natural world that she describes is dark yet also lovely, so full of enchantment and magic.

Here, the lizards speak, worms glow in the dark, and the most delicious soup in the world winds up being deadly, and one woman dines on the soil as though it were candy.

With her trademark verve, charm, and wit stay elemental and are a delight to behold, even while facing a crumbling relationship. These poems face off against delicate topics of loss and love with an exacting exuberance and elegance that aren’t often seen in a writer that is so young.

“At the Drive-In Volcano” won the Balcones Prize.

“Lucky Fish” is a poetry collection that was released in 2011. “Lucky Fish” travels along this lush current; a confluence of startling formal variety and leaping vocabulary, with some upwelling gratitude at its source. For motherhood, love, new hope, and the rich and fluid possibilities of words themselves.

With this exuberant appetite for a morning song, that scurry step, the dew, all anchored in some complex human situations, this astounding young poet’s third collection of poetry is her strongest to date.

“Lucky Fish” won the gold medal at the Independent Publisher Book Awards

“Oceanic” is a poetry collection that was released in 2018. In her fourth collection, Aimee hums a bright blue note, this sensuous love song to Earth along with all of its inhabitants. “Oceanic” is both its title and an ethos of radical inclusion, inviting in the icy eyes of a scallop, the grief of one elephant, and the bright flash of painted fingernails.

With unmatched sincerity, this book speaks to every reader as the cooperative part of the natural world, which is the extraordinary neighborhood that we all belong to. Written by a poet that is emphatically and ecstatically, naming what it really means to love a world that’s in peril.

“Oceanic” won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award.

“World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments” is an essay collection that was released in 2020. The natural world, and the way that its inhabitants can support, teach, and inspire each of us.

Aimee, as a kid, called many places home. The grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mom was a doctor. The open skies and the tall mountains of of Arizona, where she went on hikes with her Indian dad. As well as the chillier climes of Ohio and western New York. However no matter where she called home, no matter how forbidding the landscape or how awkward the fit was, she was able to turn to our world’s funniest and fiercest of creatures for guidance.

She tells us that the peacock is able to remind us about a home we’ll run away from and run back to our entire life. The touch-me-not plant shows us how we shake off unwanted advances. The axolotl teaches us to smile, even while facing unkindness. The narwhal demonstrates to us how to survive while in hostile environments. Even in the unlovely and odd, Aimee finds kinship and beauty. For it’s this way with wonder that it requires us to be curious enough to look beyond all distractions in order to better appreciate all of the world’s gifts.

Lyrical, warm, and beautifully illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, this is a book of joy and sustenance.

“World of Wonders” was named Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in nonfiction.