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, and other journals.

Her poem "Portrait of A Woman Beside Her Marker" won First Place in New York’s W.B. Society’s 2000 Poetry Competition. 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.

Somerville holds an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College (CUNY) where she worked as graduate fellow, won the school's 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. She also holds an MTS from Harvard University, where she completed work in two areas of focus: the intersection between religion and literature, and theology.

Somerville began her teaching career as a middle school teacher in the Bronx and went on to teach elementary school, secondary school, and scholarly and creative writing at the City University of New York and the State University of New York and continued thereafter to work extensively in as a tutor and educational activist in New York City schools and community settings.

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), Sucker Punch, a novel, and more recently, The Fish Rots From the Head a theological memoir about the Roman Catholic Church.

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