Melissa Buckheit, Curator of Edge Reading Series

Melissa Buckheit is a poet, dancer/choreographer, photographer, English Lecturer and professional Bodywork Therapist. She is the author of Noctilucent (Shearsman Books, 2012), Arc (The Drunken Boat, 2007), and her poems, translations, photography, essays, interviews and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in HerKind, The VOLTA, Denver Quarterly, Tarpaulin Sky, The Drunken Boat, Sinister Wisdom, Can-Can, Bombay Gin, Cutthroat, Spiral Orb, Shearsman Magazine, Blue Fifth Review and Sonora Review, among others. 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 served on the Poetry Committee for the Tucson Festival of Books from 2009-2011, is a manuscript Editor for Kore Press, does grantwriting for The Esperanza Dance Project and founded and curates the innovative & diverse Edge Reading Series for Emerging and Younger Writers, at Casa Libre in Tucson, AZ, since 2007. Buckheit holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Naropa University and a B.A. in English/American Literature & Dance/Theatre from Brandeis University. She teaches at Pima Community College and Zuzi Dance Company. Find her at melissabuckheit.com.