Michelle Naka Pierce

Michelle Naka Pierce writes of memory as memory fails. In her most recent work, Sutured Memorī, Pierce attempts to stitch together a life—the matrilineal bodies of mother, grandmother, and daughter in a constellation of poetry, illness, healing, and endurance. An excerpt of this project is available as a chapbook: MAMA (Finishing Line Press), a poem thirty years in the making, honoring her mother’s resilience and survival of the war.

Author of five full-length books and numerous chapbooks, Pierce embraces collaborative writing 氣 / KI / energies. CONTINUOUS FRIEZE BORDERING RED (awarded Fordham University Press’s Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize) meditates on Rothko’s Seagram Murals to document the migratory patterns of an Other, as she travels between countries, languages, seasons, and shifting identities. SHE, A BLUEPRINT (BlazeVox), with art by Sue Hammond West, takes inspiration from Gordon Matta-Clark’s “building cuttings” and explores the liminal space in architecture and the body while paying homage to women writers. While QUARTER LIGHT (Wisdom Body Collective), written with K Blasco Solér, Amy Bobeda, and Ali Meyung, is a somatic ritual marking the declining light from autumnal equinox to winter solstice.

Pierce has taught at Naropa University for over 20 years, where she served as the inaugural dean of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and the director of the Writing Center. Her pedagogy is deeply informed by experiential and embodied writing practices (such as Akai Ito, Jo Ha Kyu, and intention setting), as well as her background in dance and ekphrastic poetics, where practice-based research meets the mindbody as a site of experimental failure. That is, her teaching emphasizes risk-taking and engaging with language as a living, evolving medium—what the Japanese express as 七転び八起き / Nana Korobi Ya Oki / fall down seven stand up eight. Born in Japan and raised in the States, her work often embodies the complexity of the mixed-race hybrid body. Pierce currently resides near the Rocky Mountains with poet Chris Pusateri and Shigin Sensei Michiko Masuda Pierce.