Mindy Nettifee is Pushcart Prize nominated writer and accomplished performance poet. She has competed in five National Poetry Slams, performed in hundreds of venues and universities across America and Europe, opened for indie rock acts the Cold War Kids and Meiko, and toured as a castmember with the Poetry Revival and The Whirlwind Company. She believes poetry should hammer all the nerves and swell the heart and shake the sleeping. She has curated poetry events for the Smithsonian Project, The Getty Museum, GirlFest Hawaii, The Drums Inside Your Chest poetry concert series and more. She is the author of Sleepyhead Assassins (Moon Tide Press) and Rise of the Trust Fall (Write Bloody Press) and is the co-founder and director of the nonprofit Write Now Poetry Society, an organization working to build the audience for great poetry (writenowpoets.org).
What others have to say about Mindy:
"Mindy Nettifee's poetry is the linguistic orgasm we've all been waiting for."
-Bust Magazine
“With detail to craft combined with her already brutal, and important, revelations, Nettifee’s writing and Write Bloody Press books are a welcome, important vehicle in poetry for some time to come."
-Chicago Sun Times
“Mindy Nettifee is the future of poetry.”
-Bob Holman, poet and proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club dubbed Poetry Czar of New York City
"When award-winning Long Beach poet Mindy Nettifee speaks...you’re powerless—you have no choice but to raise your wine glass high over your osmosis head and join her pledge of allegiance to graphic truth. Her poems have the grace of cursive letters and the guts of a truck driver."
-District Weekly
“Mindy Nettifee is destined to be the next Dorothy Parker.”
-Poetic Diversity
“Mindy Nettifee's work is extremely satisfying, the culmination of an escalating potential that is only now beginning to come into its own.”
-OC Weekly
“Mindy Nettifee chooses powerful material and addresses it from a place of strength and stillness….Her poems have staying power.”
-Poetix
“Mindy Nettifee makes you want to cut out her ready eyes and put them in your own sockets so you can collect all that her poetry has made you imagine. She will make you reminisce of places you have never been. You will travel on her nightmares. Mindy is one of the most powerful, vaginal and visceral forces in contemporary American literature.”
-Derrick Brown, Individual Poetry Slam Champion and author of Born In The Year of the Butterfly Knife and I Love You Is Back
“That moment at which the body arches parenthesis just before orgasm. Nettifee’s poems give you that. Not just metaphor and device, not just ‘le mot juste’ or the recognizable meter of the air we breathe, she dissects the most intimate moments and what she returns to you is at once explanation and surprise – the clarity of everything that makes us, us. And when this unfolds Mindy conjures something beautiful and immediately recognizable as wonderful art.”
-Roger Bonair-Agard, two-time National Slam Champion and author of Tarnish and Masquerade
“Mindy Nettifee reminds me what I came here for. Something brilliant.”
-Buddy Wakefield, two-time Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and author of Live for a Living
“Mindy's poems have the patience, grace and music of a friend who has listened to the world carefully and for a long time. Because Mindy Nettifee understands compassion is a kind of intelligence and has the gifts to make you laugh even as your heart is breaking, her poems achieve a rare and necessary American wisdom."
-Patrick Rosal, author of Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive and My American Kundiman.
