Biography

Michelle Whittaker is an American poet of West Indian heritage whose work moves between music and language, body and landscape. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Stony Brook University–Southampton, after earlier studies in music composition and piano with Dr. Donald Bohlen. As an Associate Professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at SBU, she teaches and researches expository and creative writing pedagogy, the rhetoric of 20th-century American poetry, ecopoetics, and the intersections of disability, bodies, and illness in literature. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Slowdown, Gulf Coast: Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, Academy of American Poets: Poem-a-Day, Upstreet, Narrative, Shenandoah, Long Island Quarterly, and Transitions Magazine for the Hutchins Center, among other publications. She is the author of Surge (great weather for MEDIA) and Spoke the Dark Matter (Sundress Publications, 2024). She currently serves as Poetry Editor for The Southampton Review.

Honors:

She was awarded a Finalist Medal for the 2018 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Poetry, a 2017 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry, a Jody Donohue Poetry Prize, Cave Canem Fellowship for African American poetry, and a Pushcart Special Mention.