Contributor

Michelle Boisseau

Professor of English, Dept. of English Language and Literature, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Michelle Boisseau was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1955. She was educated at Ohio University (BA 1977, MA 1980) and the University of Houston (PhD, 1985). She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where she is Senior Editor of BkMk Press and Contributing Editor of New Letters. She won the Tampa Review Prize for her fifth book of poems, Among the Gorgons, published by Tampa Review Press in 2016. Her A Sunday in God-Years, Arkansas 2009, in part examines her paternal ancestors’s slave-holding past in Virginia, into the 17th century. Trembling Air was a PEN USA finalist, University of Arkansas Press, 2003; she’s also published Understory, the Morse Prize, Northeastern University Press, 1996, and No Private Life, Vanderbilt, 1990. Recent poems, interviews, essays, and commentary have appeared in Best American Poetry 2016, Poetry Daily, Poetry, Gettysburg Review, New Ohio Review, New Letters, Southwest Review, Shenandoah and elsewhere. You can also find her some of her work on the Poetry Foundation website. Her textbook, Writing Poems (Longman), is now in its 8th edition. Boisseau has twice been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in the Brookside area of KC, MOs City. She has been a Royals fan since 1995, when she and her family moved to KC, but she grew up as a Reds fan, and was even kissed by Sparky Anderson on her 17th birthday while she was out celebrating with her dad.

November 14, 2016

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