Michelle Bitting

Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2024 Cleaver Magazine “Duality” Creative Non-Fiction Award and has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department for her original poem “Twyla” as a finalist in the Paris/Olympiad cultural exchange this September 2024. She was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge,the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, the 2021 Fish Poetry Contest judged by Billy Collins, and a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize. She won the 2018 Fischer Poetry Prize, Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest and is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recipient of a starred review and Best of Indie 2022 from Kirkus Reviews. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist, 2024, is from C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, her poems have also appeared on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. She was a finalist for the 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize, as well as the 2021 Ruminate Magazine, 2019 Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests. Other credits include the Beyond Baroque and Glimmer Train poetry awards and finalist for the Poets & Writers Magazine California Exchange, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Julia Peterkin, and Rita Dove poetry awards. Poems have been nominated for Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly’s Poetry Awards. Michelle holds an MFA in Poetry and an MA & PhD in Mythological Studies. She is a Senior Lecturer in Poetry and Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University and Film Studies at U of Arizona Global.