Michelle Bitting was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. A dancer and a chef, she studied theater at U.C.Berkeley and received an M.F.A. from Pacific University, Oregon. In 2007, Thomas Lux chose her manuscript Good Friday Kiss as the winner of the DeNovo First Book Award. Her prize-winning poems have been published widely in numerous journals including The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner and Narrative Magazine. Poems have been reprinted on Verse Daily. Michelle teaches in the U.C.L.A. Extension Writer’s Program and as a California Poet in the Schools. Notes to the Beloved won the 2011 Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award.

Other poems by Michelle Bitting in Verse Daily:
October 10, 2008:   "The Feeding" "It was about love. It was about survival...."

Books by Michelle Bitting:

Other poems on the web by Michelle Bitting:
"Sheriff"
Three poems
"Twyla"
Four poems
"Boys Like You"
"Little Red Car"
Three poems
"On Any Day Like Alice"
"Anniversary"
"Open in Case of"
"Mammary"
"Mother’s Day Omen"
Two poems
"Transitions"
"Epiphany"
Two poems
"Videorama"
"The Sacrifice"

Michelle Bitting's Website.

Michelle Bitting According to Wikipedia.

About Notes to the Beloved:

"Notes to the Beloved brims with the language of a fully lived life. A powerful female voice, body, spirit and sensibility inhabits this book and shakes it to the core. Bitting is at her best here: unbridled, open, aware."
—Dorianne Laux

"Richly dense in both language and insight into the human heart, Michelle Bitting’s Notes to the Beloved is a stunning collection of poems. As a fiction writer I am thrilled particularly by her voice, by the yearning of her poetic persona for a self, for a place in the universe, that yearning being the deeply beating heart of narrative as well. She is one of my favorite poets and this book will abide in me for a long, long time to come."
—Robert Olen Butler

"This amazing book will get inside you. Notes to the Beloved pulses with immediacy. The sensory language, the resolute momentum, a large and courageous heart–here is a rare, seductive wholeness. Michelle Bitting’s poetry is at once personal and transcendent. What could be better?"
—Marvin Bell

"The poems of Michelle Bitting’s gorgeous new collection, Notes to the Beloved, feel like exquisite origami epistles that their recipients (and her readers) are asked to unfold the way the lovers of these poems have unfolded each other’s bodies. These eloquent reflections on love both found and lost echo with desire, humor, and a fierce sense of continued hope, reminding us that torn valentines are sometimes the most beautiful."
—David St. John