I am a poet, scholar, and the founder of Draft by Draft, which provides coaching for academic writers. I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and live in Indianapolis, where I co-organize the monthly poetry series NIGHTJAR with C.S. Carrier and lead mindful nature walks with Indy Community Yoga. My poems have appeared in RHINO, after hours, Cannot Exist, Post45, Wild Roof Journal, and Dogwood Alchemy, and are forthcoming in Quotidian. My scholarly work on poetry has been published in journals and edited collections including Post45: Contemporaries, the Journal of Modern Literature, Victorian Poetry, and Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field. I have also published essays on the politics of organic farming and the history of composting in Edge Effects.
My article on Lorine Niedecker’s food and farming poems of the 1930s and 40s appeared in Modernism/modernity and was nominated for the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature’s outstanding essay award in 2019, receiving an honorable mention. I earned my PhD in English at the University of Wisconsin, where I wrote my dissertation on organic form in modern and contemporary poetry and organic metaphors in sustainable agriculture. As a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA, I coordinated a Mellon Sawyer seminar on the environmental humanities and co-edited The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017) with Ursula K. Heise and Jon Christensen.
Photograph by Elizabeth Leitzell.
Michelle Niemann 