Poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil Visits as 12th Westminster Poet

Poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil visited Westminster April 16 and 17 as the 12th Westminster Poet. During her two full days on campus, the first for a Westminster Poet, she gave a reading and visited English classes to talk with students about her poetry.
 

Nezhukumatathil is the author of three poetry collections: “Lucky Fish” (2011); “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 first chapbook, “Fishbone” (2000), won the Snail’s Pace Press Prize. Students and teachers had read and studied her three books of poetry throughout 2011-2012 in preparation for her visit.
 

At her reading in the Werner Centennial Center, she read poems from all three books and talked about the history of each poem, her family and her career.
 

When meeting with students in their English classes, she encouraged them to approach reading poetry differently from other reading, saying, “For poems, it helps if you read slowly and ‘unplug’ for that time.”
 

She also talked about her writing process, explaining how she always carries a notebook to record images and sounds she may want to remember. “Poetry comes from the most unlikely places,” she said. “We all think in poems. You picture all of these sensory details.” She added that she looks for moments of joy or beauty, and often finds inspiration in news stories and science books. “I might have a topic in mind, but about 90 percent of the time, it doesn’t end up that way. I like to take leaps.”
 

When asked how long it takes her to write a poem, she said she is a fast composer but a slow editor. “Poetry for me is communicating,” she emphasized. “If I can use personal experience to capture a universal theme, then I have done my job.”
 

She shared how she started out in college as a “hapless” chemistry major and then a teacher changed everything for her. “Hopefully, everyone here has a teacher who changes their life.”
 

“Aimee Nezhukumatathil was everything we’d hoped she be and more,” said Michael Cervas, head of the English Department. “An excellent poet. An engaging reader. An accomplished teacher who knows how to reach high school age students. All three of her books were accessible enough on the one hand and challenging and mysterious enough on the other to make them ideal texts for study in the classroom. There are plenty of her poems that I’ll come back to and teach again.”
 

Nezhukumatathil was born in Chicago, to a Filipina mother and a father from South India. She attended Ohio State University where she received her B.A. in English and her M.F.A. in poetry and creative nonfiction. She was a Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is associate professor of English at State University of New York at Fredonia, where she teaches creative writing and environmental literature. She has received several awards honoring her outstanding teaching.
 

“Charming, funny and spirited, Aimee made talking about poetry a cool thing to do, and because she’s such a vibrant, outgoing person, she managed to get a lot of different kinds of students talking about poetry,” added Michael. “Of all the poets we’ve had come to Westminster over the past 13 years, Aimee was one of the best at conducting classes. She’s won awards for her outstanding teaching at SUNY Fredonia, and now we know why.”
 

Aimee’s other 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, an Associated Writing Programs Intro Award in creative nonfiction and fellowships to the MacDowell Arts Colony.
 

She lives in Western New York with her husband and two young sons and is at work on a collection of nature essays and more poems.
 

Aimee’s Westminster visit was made possible through support from the Ford-Goldfarb Fund, which was established in 2005 by former trustee Maureen Ford-Goldfarb and her daughter Kirsten Ford ’00 to support English Department enrichment activities.