Melissa Buckheit

MELISSA BUCKHEIT is a poet, dancer/choreographer, photographer, English Lecturer and professional Bodywork Therapist. She is the author of Noctilucent (Shearsman Books, 2012), and two chapbooks: Dulcet You (dancing girl press, August 2016), and Arc (The Drunken Boat, 2007). Her poems, translations, photography, essays, critical interviews and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, HerKind, The VOLTA, Sinister Wisdom, The Drunken Boat, Bombay Gin, Spiral Orb, Shearsman Magazine, Waxwing, The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (University of Arizona Press, 2016), and elsewhere. Olga Broumas has described her poetry as deploying “the sensory intricacies of high lyric, iridescent candor & dynamic range to serve our imagination an eclectic feast of electrifying, intimate, thermospheric meditations,” and Jocelyn Heath, in a review in Lambda Literary, noted of Noctilucent that, “Buckheit pairs earthly longings with writings of celestial delicacy to show us what we can see when we look beyond immediacy. Her collection, like the noctilucent cloud that shares its name, lingers long in the atmosphere.” Buckheit translates the poet Ioulita Iliopoulou from Modern Greek, and is a recipient of the American Poets Honorary Award, a Tucson-Pima Arts Council Dance grant, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Naropa University and a B.A. in English & American Literature, Dance/Theatre & French from Brandeis University. She has co-curated the innovative Edge Reading Series in Tucson, AZ since 2008, and taught at Pima College, University of Arizona and Zuzi Dance Company. Find her at melissabuckheit.com.