Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Every chapter of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments hands one plant or animal a piece of a life. Aimee Nezhukumatathil sets natural history beside memoir, and Fumi Mini Nakamura illustrated the book throughout for Milkweed Editions, which published it in 2020. It became a New York Times bestseller and Barnes & Noble's Book of the Year. Born in Chicago in 1974 to a Filipina mother and a Malayali Indian father, Nezhukumatathil took both her BA and her MFA at Ohio State, and had already published four poetry collections, Miracle Fruit, At the Drive-In Volcano, Lucky Fish and Oceanic, before turning to prose. She teaches English and creative writing at Ole Miss and lives in Oxford. She held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020, edited poetry at Orion from 2015 to 2020, and followed World of Wonders with a second essay collection, Bite by Bite, in 2024.