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| photo: Dustin Parsons | |
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the poetry collection Night Owl (Ecco, March 31, 2026), which explores love, nature, and the transformative powers of the night. She is also the author of two illustrated collections of essays: Bite by Bite and World of Wonders. She is also the author of four award-winning poetry collections and spent a decade as the poetry editor for environmental magazines, first for Orion and then Sierra. Awards for her writing include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, U.S. Artist Fellows, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A professor of English and creative writing for more than 25 years, she gives firefly tours for Mississippi State Parks and lives in Oxford, Miss., with her family.
Handsell readers your book in 30 words or less:
Not your grandpa's nature writing. Here love and wonder meet under the cover of night, reminding us that attention and tenderness still exist--even in the dark.
On your nightstand now:
This lyric manifesto that is hard to slide into a genre form (my fave kinds of books), Let the Poets Govern by Camonghne Felix gives some historical background of her work on political campaigns and weaves Black writers together with her own moving personal history to help me imagine a better world for us all. Also: Words to Love a Planet--an illustrated lexicon by Ella Frances Sanders, the designer of Orion magazine. I love learning a new word each night, like gökotta, a Swedish word that means waking up at dawn to go birdwatching.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Field guides. I loved (and still do!) regional field guides to birds, wildflowers, trees, and shells, and because I was a nerd, I honestly loved reading dictionaries and encyclopedias for days, though my parents never succumbed to the door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen in the '80s. So I would sit on the floors of various childhood libraries and read about Anne Boleyn to rhinoceroses to Iceland till the lights flickered off or until my parents said it's time for dinner.
Your top five authors:
Naomi Shihab Nye, Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, Agha Shahid Ali, Ross Gay.
Book you've faked reading:
Nothing. There is no one on the planet I want to impress by what I have or haven't read. I have no qualms about admitting when I didn't read or couldn't get through it. But that also means, with joy for me, that there are SO many books I want to read. I honestly never understand when someone says they are bored. And I've felt like that ever since I could read as a little girl, truly.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Fireflies, Glow-worms, and Lightning Bugs by Lynn Frierson Faust is a book that gives you an inside look at my favorite insect on the planet. Lynn never talks down to you but instead it feels like your world just cracks open knowing more about the fragile magic of these insects.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Anyone who knows me knows I have a special affinity for cephalopods so when the bright orange (collage? watercolor?) octopus on the cover seemed to beckon to me with its arm, I was hooked from the get-go. Now soon it will be a Netflix series but this one you have to read first, I promise: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt.
Book you hid from your parents:
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume: I think the questioning of God's existence would have worried my parents more than mentions of menstruation or stuffing bras but now, as a mother of teen boys, that period of girlhood/cusp of teen years feels so sweet and precious, I get so nostalgic, and it reminds me of the time and work my husband and I did to cultivate an open relationship with our teens.
Book that changed your life:
Let's be honest: D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire is STILL a book that I can spend time with and linger over the soft colored pencil drawings for hours. I didn't always have the vocabulary for my reactions to the messed-up misogynist myths (Zeus and Apollo, anyone?) but I know the drawings helped me imagine alternate endings for the mythical characters. I think I was about 10 when I first encountered this book and must have checked it out of the library dozens of times, in libraries from the suburbs of Phoenix to rural Kansas, from having moved around a lot. I finally have my own copy now, and it's pretty worn out.
Favorite line from a book:
"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love." This is the opening line of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. I first read it in grad school, and it opened my eyes (and my nose) to how important the sense of smell can be in your writing.
Five books you'll never part with:
Birds of Louisiana and Mississippi: A Field Guide by Stan Tekiela: I bought this on a whim when we first moved to Mississippi, and it taught me so much beauty and how to slow down. I mean more than I already did when outdoors. Though I didn't use a single bird from it, I would never have been able to write World of Wonders without the headspace this guide gave me.
The Book of Light, first edition, by Lucille Clifton: poems that just made me feel like the top of my head was on fire. It taught me breath. And pauses in poetry.
Field Book of Ponds and Streams by Ann Haven Morgan: gifted to me by my dear pal from grad school Mark Steinwachs. He collects rare books and this is a first edition with 23 plates in color from 1930. Each color plate is covered by a near-perfect thin vellum and is just a pleasure to hold in your hand.
Signed copy of Broken Symmetry by David Citino, my beloved mentor who passed away in 2005: these poems taught me breath, and the magic of opening any page and hearing his kind voice sets me back to my early days of being a baby poet/ex-chemistry major and how these pages made me see the world and the possibility of a life in words, anew.
Exploded View by Dustin Parsons: okay full disclosure, this is by my husband, but it is signed to me and I know how hard he worked on this collection of lyric essays about making sense of fatherhood and the kind of man I hope our boys grow into.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Circe and Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. For a gal who grew up hungry for other POVs in Greek mythology (namely, the women or characters who had mentions of strong opinions or a quiet simmering force in their own right), these books are a delicious marvel. I created a new literature course on my campus just so I can teach these two books, and I love seeing the students all swoon and get heavily invested in each novel to the point where I have former students still e-mailing me their thoughts about the upcoming movie adaptation of Odyssey. Can we just cast Connor Storrie as Achilles already in whatever screen adaptation, pretty please?
Why you wanted to write about the night in this fifth collection of poems:
Night has always given me a way to reflect and contemplate the bustle of the day. Emotions "glow" differently at night, I think, and I wanted to showcase all the movement and wonder that can come from nighttime since night is all too often shown as a place for fear or worry. I wanted to showcase how night gives us a container to be our most tender, our most vulnerable.