Michele Madigan Somerville

Glamourous Life (2020) is available from Rain Mountain Press!

Michele Madigan Somerville is the author of two other books of verse, Black Irish (poems, Plain View Press, 2009) and WISEGAL (Ten Pell Books, 2001; Blue Streak Books, 2020).

Somerville's poems have appeared in Mudfish, Ballast Journal, Puerto del Sol, The Nervous Breakdown, Brooklyn Review, Downtown Brooklyn, Hanging Loose, Periphery, Ballast Poetry 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 focused on in theology and the the intersection between theology and literature. 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.

Somerville worked as a classroom teacher 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 as a tutor, and educational 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, Meatland (poems) which includes a cycle of poem about New York City and September 11, 2001, Sucker Punch, a novel, and most recently, The Fish Rots From the Head a theological memoir about her radical Catholicism and the politics of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church. She has posted pieces about religion and politics for several years on her one-woman operation Indie Theology.

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