Michelle Reed grew up in Michigan and completed a Master of Arts in English at Bucknell University. She lives with her husband and their little dog in Chicago, where she is working on her second manuscript. Her poems have appeared in Bodega, Apercus Quarterly, and Watershed Review, among others. She dabbles in nonfiction when she is feeling very brave.

Books by Michelle Reed:

Other poems on the web by Michelle Reed:
"Catcall #27"
Five poems
Two poems
Two poems

About I Don't Need to Make a Pretty Thing:

"Michelle Reed's poems move seamlessly between a world peopled with family, catcallers, and kickboxing gurus, and a world of wilderness and animal wonder, 'whole bodies lost to greenery.' In both landscapes, they eschew the merely pretty and point towards the strange, the tender, the place that hurts and the thing that heals. In this stunning debut, the poems listen hard and they speak back, weaving a subtle strength on the other side of pretty."
—Laura Donnelly