Michelle Brittan Rosado is the author of Why Can't It Be Tenderness, which won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and published by University of Wisconsin Press in November 2018. Her chapbook, Theory on Falling into a Reef, was the winner of the inaugural Rick Campbell Prize (Anhinga Press, 2016). Her poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Poet Lore, and The New Yorker, as well as the anthologies Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25, Only Light Can Do That: 100 Post-Election Poems, Stories, & Essays, and Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience.
She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from California State University, Fresno, and recently completed a PhD Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She has received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Sustainable Arts Foundation, USC’s Center for Transpacific Studies, and the Vermont Studio Center. While at work on her second collection of poems, Michelle is also writing an academic book titled The Pantoum across the Pacific: The Circumnavigation of a Poetic Form. She lives in Long Beach.