Michele Madigan Somerville

Michele Madigan Somerville is the author of four books of verse, Black Cloud, White Ash, (New Meridian Arts, 2026), Glamourous Life, (poems Rain Mountain Press) 2020, Black Irish (poems, Plain View Press, 2009), and WISEGAL (Ten Pell Books, 2001, and Blue Streak Books, 2020).

Somerville's poems have appeared in Hanging Loose, Periphery, Ballast Poetry, Live Mag, Mudfish, Ballast Journal, Puerto del Sol, The Nervous Breakdown, Brooklyn Review, Downtown Brooklyn, and others.

Her poem "Portrait of A Woman Beside Her Marker" won First Place in New York’s W. B. Society’s 2000 Poetry Competition (Billy Collins was the judge.) Charles Simic selected "Lonicera Frangrantissima" for Honorable Mention in Dublin in Ireland's Eason Books' Davoren Hanna Poetry Contest in 2003. Glamourous Life (2020 Rain Mountain) won an honorable mention eight years prior to its publication in Bauhan Books’ May Sarton Contest.

Somerville's essays have appeared in Religion Dispatches, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and The New York Times; and her book reviews, in The Poetry Project Newsletter, Variety and Book Marks, and has extensive experience in curating poetry performances and programs in New York.

She also holds an MTS from Harvard University, where she completed work in two areas of focus—theology and the the intersection between theology and literature. In addition, Somerville continues to study Roman Catholicism as an independent, unaffiliated, independent scholar, with particular focus on the intersection between contemporary Catholicism and secular politics in the United States, the clergy sex abuse crisis and cover-up, and Roman Catholic media and communications.

Somerville also completed an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College (C.U.N.Y.) where she worked as graduate fellow, won the English Department' s MacArthur Award/scholarship for Poetry, received a the Louis B. Goodman Award/scholarship for Woman-Centered Writing, and completed a thesis under the guidance of Allen Ginsberg and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.

Michele Somerville worked as a educator in and around New York City for fifteen years before turning her attention to tutoring, community teaching, and writing about education. She began her teaching career as a middle school teacher in the Bronx, and taught elementary and secondary school in the South Bronx and Brooklyn. She went on to taught scholarly and creative writing at the City University of New York and the Purchase College (State University of New York) for a total of eleven years, and continued thereafter to work extensively teaching pro-bono tutor in New York City. Somerville has extensive experience as an activist in New York City

Michele Madigan Somerville is currently at work on After Class, an education memoir, Via Crucis, a book-length poem on the Stations of the Cross, Sacrifice/ Fly (poems), Sucker Punch, a novel, a short collection of translations of the oft -translated and adapted Roman poet Catullus, and The Fish Rots From the Head a theological memoir in which she writes simultaneously about her individual Catholic journey and the institutional Roman Catholic Church. She posts commentary and analysis on religion on her one-woman operation Indie Theology.

She currently works as an editor, writer and tutor, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.