Michael Mlekoday is a poet, educator, editor, and theorist. Their first book of poems, The Dead Eat Everything, was chosen by Dorianne Laux for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Their second book, All Earthly Bodies, was chosen by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. Mlekoday is a National Poetry Slam Champion and was a co-founding Editor of Button Poetry. Their dissertation, Vegetal Imaginaries in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, looks to the ways that writers invoke plant life as they theorize mind, embodiment, epistemology, queerness, and power. Mlekoday teaches classes on Gothic literature, Hip-Hop poetics, and other fun stuff. 

Education

PhD (in progress), English, University of California, Davis, 2015-present.

M.F.A., Poetry, Indiana University, Bloomington, 2014.

M.A. with Distinction, English & Creative Writing, Kansas State University, 2011.

B.A., English, University of Minnesota, 2009.

Poetry Publications

All Earthly Bodies, University of Arkansas Press, March 2022.

The Dead Eat Everything, Kent State University Press, 2014. (reviewed in Poetry International, The Georgia Review, Colorado Review, Sycamore Review, & American Microreviews)

various poems in literary journals & anthologies such as: The BreakBeat Poets, ​Ploughshares, The Sewanee Review, Florida Review, Ninth Letter, The Southampton Review, Southern Indiana Review, cream city review, Verse Daily, Salt Hill, Third Coast, The Greensboro Review,  etc.

Conference Presentations

"Melville's Pierre and the Desire to Be a Plant: Towards an Anti-Anthropocentric Reading Practice", Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies, Los Angeles, CA, March 2020.

"The Genealogical Uncanny in Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation", Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association, San Diego, CA, November 2019.

"'As a hound pines to be a wolf': Trans-ing Species in dg nanouk okpik's Shamanic Poetics", Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, Davis, CA, June 2019. 

"Thoreau Against Antigone, or, Individualism and Its Vicissitudes", American Literature Association, San Francisco, CA, May 2018.

“Trans-corporeality and Ecopsychoanalysis in Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing”, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, Detroit, MI, June 2017.

“‘A ghost dressed in weeds’: The Gothic Double and Ecopsychoanalysis in Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing”, Gothic Trespass (colloquium), University of Texas, Austin. April 2017.

“‘With a hand to re-arrange us’: Labor and the Postnatural in Contemporary Transgender Pastoral”, Modern Languages Association, Austin, TX, January 2016.