Interview with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Judge of the 2025 Nature Poetry Prize
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the New York Times bestselling illustrated collection of nature essays, World of Wonders: IN praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year and named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. She also wrote Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees (Ecco/Harper Collins), and four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. With the poet Ross Gay, she coauthored the chapbook Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems. Her writing appears twice in The Best American Poetry series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review.
Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council Grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra Magazine, the storytelling arm of The Sierra Club. Nezhukumatathil is professor of English and creative writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program where she received the faculty’s Distinguished Research and Creative Achievement Award.
Interview with Aimee Nezhukumatathil
by Marcella Haddad
Marcella Haddad: Why is writing about nature so important?
Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Today here in March, a new study revealed we’ve lost 22% of the butterflies on this planet. I mean, we are not separate from nature so it’s crucial as human beings that we are always noticing, always observing while we have butterflies around, for example. We have everything to lose if we forget.
Haddad: What are some of your favorite examples of nature poetry?
Nezhukumatathil: So many I can’t possibly name them all but for starters: Mary Oliver, Kimiko Hahn, Alison Hawthorne Deming, and most short essays of Brian Doyle I find quite lyrical.
Haddad: You have written full-length collections as well as a shorter chapbook of poetry. How do you decide on the length of a collection of writing? How do you know when it’s ready to become a book?
Nezhukumatathil: Oh it’s different for every book but I suppose one similarity is a feeling like things are starting to jell together, like the very best jams: some sweetness and some tart to surprise you.
Haddad: Do you have any advice for poets who would like to be published?
Nezhukumatathil: Publishing is like joining a dinner party. Be a good guest—know what the conversations are like before you bust into the door. In other words: read magazines, read individual collections of poets you dig and poets that confuse you. Read anthologies grouped around a subject that interests you, etc. You want to contribute your own unique conversation—not just rehash what has already been said earlier that evening. The only way to do that is to find out what is going on. I’ll never understand people who want to publish who don’t want to read (and support) literary magazines. That’s like wanting to play a concert without wanting to listen to (and support) others’ music first.
Haddad: What role do writers play in our relationship to the earth, climate, and nature?
Nezhukumatathil: I can only speak for me, but one of my heroes, Rachel Carson, said it best: “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” When I read really good writing about the outdoors, I seem to always have even less taste for destruction.
Haddad: What was the most surprising thing that happened during the process of writing your most recent book, Bite By Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees?
Nezhukumatathil: That my beloved immigrant parents a) wanted to read it and b) didn’t correct me on any chapter, which might be a first in over 20++ years! 🙂
Haddad: How do you approach writing an essay differently than writing a poem?
Nezhukumatathil: I’ll always be a poet first I think (but I have a dual MFA in poetry and creative non-fiction) but quite simply, I started to resent the linebreak. It seemed ugly to me (I’m back to loving the linebreak, you’ll be happy to know)… When I was writing about these plants and animals that literally make me swoon, I needed more space— something like an unspooling or unfurling of language that I didn’t want interrupted with a linebreak’s tension. And I also was interested in a kind of rising action and the small fall that can happen when building full and robust sentences (as opposed to lines) that I don’t ever think about when drafting a poem. I can breathe in both genres, but essays help me draw a deeper breath…
Haddad: What is your next writing, poetry, or career-related goal?
Nezhukumatathil: To write a book that surprises and delights and confounds me more than the last. I have a new book of poems—my fifth!—coming from Ecco in 2026 and am so relieved that it checks all those boxes! Am resting a bit for now and tending to family as my eldest is about to graduate high school in a couple of months. So another goal is to make a strawberry rhubarb pie that knocks my husband’s socks off.
Haddad: What are you most excited to see in submissions for The Nature Poetry Prize?
Nezhukumatathil: As someone who has taught nature writing for decades, I can tell you when I set my students to a writing task, I ask them (in so many words) to start with and from a place of love (for the body of water, the animal, the forest, the flower—whatever it is they are writing about), so they write into that, and THEN once you have done that, the reader is usually on board and it’s easier to convince your reader to listen to solutions or to open their eyes that not everyone has had the same experiences outside, etc. Again, I’d just suggest what I do for any good piece of writing. Start with the five senses. Knock us back to that time you first smelled a dried sand dollar when you were nine. Let us feel the bits of sand tap out of the lunules and into the palm of your hand.
Learn more about the Nature Poetry Prize here