Current Read | Your One Book, One City Program

Aimee Nezhukumatathil (neh-ZOO / KOO-mah / tah-TILL) was born in Chicago, IL to a Filipina mother and a father from South India. She attended The Ohio State University where she received her BA in English and her MFA in poetry and creative non-fiction and was then awarded the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at UW-Madison. After teaching in western NY for fifteen years, Nezhukumatathil was awarded the Grisham Writer-in-Residence in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program for 2016-17.

Our book selection for 2022’s citywide read is World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

World of Wonders (Milkweed Press, 2020), Nezhukumatathil’s first nonfiction book, is an illustrated collection of nature essays told in the context of her unusual childhood growing up on the grounds of mental institutions in rural America and navigating the parent-push towards science while finding herself drawn toward language—all unfolding through detailed and delightful observations about the oddities and fascinations of our planet. Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders, which was named Barnes and Nobles’ Book of the Year, is a book of sustenance and joy. Author Kiese Laymon says the collection is, “the first book to make me feel like a firefly as much as it reminds me I’m still a black boy playing in Central Mississippi woods. The book walks. It sprints. It leaps. Most importantly, the book lingers in a world where power, people, and the literal outside wrestle painfully, beautifully. This book is a world of wonders. This book is about to shake the Earth.”

Nezhukumatathil’s poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Quarterly West, New England Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and Tin House. Poems and essays have been widely anthologized in such venues as The Best American Poetry series, Billy Collins’ second edition of Random House’s Poetry 180: A Poem a Day and Language for a New Century: Contemporary Asian American Poetry from W.W. Norton. A number of essays and poems have also been published in several high school AP English textbooks and college textbooks.

“Within two pages, nature writing feels different and fresh and new. Nezhukumatathil has written a timely story about love, identity and belonging . . . We are losing the language and the ability to see and understand the wondrous things around us. And our lives are impoverished by this process . . . This book demands we find the eyes to see and the heart to love such things once more. It is a very fine book indeed, truly full of wonder.” ―New York Times Book Review

“Reading World of Wonders, it’s clear that Nezhukumtathil is a poet. These essays sing with joy and longing―each focusing on a different natural wonder, all connected by the thread of Nezhukumtathil’s curiosity and her identification with the world’s beautiful oddities . . . It’s a heartwarming, poignant, and often funny collection, enlivened by Fumi Nakamura’s dreamy illustrations.” ―Buzz Feed, “Summer Books You Won’t Be Able to Put Down”

“Should the wonderful David Attenborough ever retire, my hope is someone at BBC has read the work of Aimee Nezhukumatathil . . . What a lovely book this is, gentle in its pacing, well-illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, and quietly subversive in the way she channels its gusts of joy.” ―Literary Hub, “Best New Books to Read This Summer”