This event is part of our 39th season of Portland Arts & Lectures. For more information on the season, please see our FAQs or reach out to Literary Arts at [email protected] or call 503-227-2583. 

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the Southern Book Prize. She is an award-winning poet, and her most recent collection is Oceanic. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. She is professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi.

Praise:

For World of Wonders:

“Nezhukumatathil has written a timely story about love, identity and belonging . . . This book demands we find the eyes to see and the heart to love such things once more. It is a very fine book indeed, truly full of wonder.” –The New York Times

“In her sensational debut book of nonfiction, Nezhukumatathil, an award-winning poet, turns her attention to the natural world, with a lyrical and imagistic look at the minor daily miracles of life on Earth . . . With her ecstatic prose and her rapturous powers of insight, Nezhukumatathil proves herself a worthy spiritual successor to the likes of Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard, setting the bar high for a new generation of nature writers.” –Esquire

For Oceanic:

“Aimee Nezhukumatathil sings an ode to earth and sea in her stunning fourth collection, Oceanic . . . Her images are lush with eroticism, always close to the body and its experience of wonder. She blurs the line between human and animal, casting herself (and her beloved) variously as a scallop, a whale shark, a penguin, a starfish. Such marvelous acts of transformation reshape us as we read.” –The San Francisco Chronicle

“There are so many reasons to return to Nezhukumatathil’s poems—her affinity for the natural world, her ability to write a love poem that truly works, her humor that surprises and salves—and Oceanic reminds me of yet another: how she can offer readers so many routes within a single poem.” –The Millions