MICHELLE DETORIE is the author of After-Cave, published by Ahsahta Press in 2014. Her publications include numerous chapbooks such as Fur Birds (Insert Press), How Hate Got Hand (eohippus labs), and Bellum Letters (Dusie). She also makes visual poems, poetry objects, and time-based poetry. Michelle is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, as well as a direct-to-artist grant from the Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative for her public art project, The Poetry Booth. Her current projects include a new collection of poetry, The Endangerers, and a collection of prose pieces called FERAL PLANETS. She lives in Santa Barbara, CA, where she writes, teaches, and edits Hex Presse. She is the co-leader of the Santa Barbara County Youth Poet Laureate Program, and from 2014-2021 she was the poetry editor for Entropy.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
My work explores language, gender, nature, interspecies friendships and relationships, power dynamics, the wonderful, and the mundane. Most of my creative research has been in the areas of ecopoetics, emancipatory social projects, feminist poetics, divination, and creating new resources in literary interventions against state violence and war, and visual/digital/intermedia poetry. I am invested in pursuing an activist poetics that is deeply engaged with linking the political project of community building with expressive language. I’m attracted to liveliness, experiments in syntax and form, writing that involves visual and spatial elements, and politically motivated writing. I am also is interested in presenting text as multi-dimensional, plastic, playful, concrete, mutable, improvised, cooperative, collaborative, and interactive. More than anything, I am motivated by the brilliance and munificence of my peers, and by the writing and art of those who seek to create community and political change through radical critique, innovation, activism, generosity, and optimism.
MICHELLE DETORIE 