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, and named a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She won Quarter After Eight’s Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest, the Beyond Baroque Foundation Poetry Award, the Glimmer Train Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the Ruminate Magazine, Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests. She is the author of six poetry collections: Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural C & R Press De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, winner of the 2011 Sacramento Poetry Center Book Prize; The Couple Who Fell to Earth (2016, C & R Press); Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently
named one of Kirkus Reviews’ 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist launched in 2024 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. Bitting holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University, Oregon, and a PhD in Mythological Studies, emphasis Poetry and Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is writing a novel centered around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.