Michelle Bitting is an Academy of American Poets 2026-2027 Laureate Fellow and was recently named a City of L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Grantee. She was short-listed for the 2024 Cleaver Magazine “Duality” Creative Non-Fiction Award and was commissioned by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department for her original poem “Twyla” as a finalist in the Paris/Olympiad cultural exchange 2024/2028. She won the 2025 Banyan Review Poetry Prize for her poem “The Clearing”, written in the wake of the Palisades-Eaton fires of January 7th, 2025. Named runner up in the 2026 Pomegranate London Poem-Play contest, her play “Celebrated British Actress Beryl Mercer Encounters her Lost Daughter Crossing the Atlantic, 1939” was performed at London’s Cockpit Theater by Théâtre Volière. Poems published by the Poetry Society of New York Jacar Press’s One, and Cleaver Magazine were nominated Best of the Net 2025. 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 is the author of seven poetry collections, including Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize, and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry, prose, and essays appear on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, West Trade Review, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, The Glacier, Ghost Parachute, Heavy Feather Review, Terrain, Split Lip, National Poetry Review, SWWIM, ONE ART, Gargoyle, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Her collection Ruined Beauty was published by Walton Well Press in June 2026. Poetry appears on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, 2026. Michelle was a California Poet in the Schools for ten years, conducting residencies in public schools and reaching over 500 students per year, and has collaborated with PRISM Restorative Justice, offering creative writing workshops to inmates at Twin Towers prison. Michelle grew up by the Pacific Ocean, studied theater at U.C. Berkeley, and has danced on film for Twyla Tharp and been a line cook for Nancy Silverton. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry, and a PhD in Mythological Studies. Bitting is the Poet Laureate of Pacific Palisades and is writing a hybrid historical novel that centers around her stage and screen great grandmother. She has two sons and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, actor Phil Abrams and their dog Harley. Michelle is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.
