Contact:
mdetorie [at]
yahoo [dot] com
Michelle Detorie grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. She currently lives in Goleta, California where she edits WOMB and Hex Presse. She used to live in Kyle, Texas where she was the 2004-2006 Writer-in-Residence at the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center. Michelle is a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts literary fellow.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in How2, Chelsea, Jacket, Blackbird, Verse Daily, The Notre Dame Review, Typo, Bird Dog, Dusie, POOL, Pindeldyboz, DIAGRAM, La Petite Zine, Cranky, Caketrain, Kadar Koli, The Tiny, The Potomac Review, FOURSQUARE, Confrontation, The Southern Poetry Review, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel(2007) and Poetry East. Her poem "Feral Thing" was published as tinyside # 9 by Big Game Books and a collection of her picture poems, Our Clean Heart, was published as a Special Edition of Foursquare. DAPHNOMANCY, a chap book of improvised texts, was published by Peter Ganick's Small Chapbook Project. BellumLetters, a chapbook of anti-war poems written during "national" poetry month, was published as part of the Dusie Chapbook Kollektiv. Another chapbook, A Coincidence of Wants, was published by Dos Press.
Current projects include Secret Alphabets and Magical Animals (a manuscript of poems), Laurels (a manuscript of poems), Mirror Girls (a prose-poem memoir-ish thing), Optimism is a Motor (a chapbook of diagramatic texts), and Daphnomancy, an improvised music and text project with guitarist Kurt Newman. She has written a number of poems inspired by different forms of ancient and medieval divination methods. Her poem "Three Divinations" was recently nominated by the editors of Blackbird for a Puschcart Prize and for inclusion in Best New Poets. She also makes visual and new media poems. You can read an interview here and reviews of her work here, here, and here.
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Michelle has an MA from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from Texas State University, where she held the Rose Fellowship.
She has taught writing at Johns Hopkins, Loyola College, and Texas State University. In addition to her work with college students, she has also taught middle and high school students, most notably at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth and the Katherine Anne Porter Young Writers Program. She is available for community, group, and private workshops in poetry, writing, publishing & editing, and the creative process.
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When she's not making poems, Michelle likes to write about pop culture and feminism for blogs like Fluffy Dollars and for magazines like Kitchen Sink. She also designs web sites and volunteers at the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network, where she works with oiled, starved, and injured sea birds.
