Mindy Nettifee is Pushcart Prize nominated writer and accomplished performance poet. She is the author of two full-length collections Sleepyhead Assassins (Moon Tide Press) and Rise of the Trust Fall (Write Bloody Press), and a collection of essays on writing Glitter In The Blood - A Poet's Manifesto for Better, Braver Writing (Write Bloody Press).
She has performed and taught in over 500 hundreds of venues, colleges and universities across America and Europe, competed in five National Poetry Slams, opened for indie rock act the Cold War Kids, headlined national poetry tours The Last Nerve - A High Tea Poetry Brawl and The Whirlwind Company, and was featured in the critically acclaimed poetry concert documentary The Drums Inside Your Chest.
Mindy believes poetry should hammer all the nerves and swell the heart and shake the sleeping. She believes we need it like we need clean air and people to smile at us every once in awhile. She director of the nonprofit poetry organization Write Now Poetry Society, which she co-founded with actress and author Amber Tamblyn. Write Now's mission is simply to build the audience for poetry, and expose as many people as possible to the good stuff (writenowpoets.org). Towards that end, Mindy has curated poetry events for the Smithsonian, The Getty Museum, GirlFest, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and more. She sincerely hopes that this whole getting-to-do-what-she-loves-for-a-living thing isn't a fluke. But if it is, well, there's always peaches and bourbon.
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 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.
