I have different answers for that now in 2021 - married and with two tween boys - than when I was 10 and looking at the nature books I checked out from our school library and wondering why I never saw an Asian American in them. The central question of searching for home is one I’ve been trying to answer my whole writing life, and I imagine I’ll spend the rest of my life answering it in some way or another. I could always breathe in both genres, poetry and nonfiction, but essays help me draw a deeper breath, so to speak. What spurred that shift?įor the past 20 years or so, I’ve mostly published poems.

This is your first foray into nonfiction. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Nezhukumatathil will visit Ohio State on March 26 for a reading of World of Wonders through the MFA Program in Creative Writing Visiting Writers Series. World of Wonders was named the Barnes & Noble 2020 Book of the Year and a Kirkus Prize Finalist for Nonfiction. Her recent book, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, is an illustrated collection of essays about the natural world and how its inhabitants teach, support and inspire us. She is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi.

Born in Chicago to a Filipina mother and South Indian father, Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a ’96 BA English and ’00 MFA poetry and creative nonfiction alumna of the Department of English.Ī poet and essayist, Nezhukumatathil has received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, the William Oxley Thompson Alumni Award and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry.

Aimee world of wonders