Amie Whittemore

Amie Whittemore, born in Illinois on October 12, 1980, earned a BA from the University of Illinois Champaign–Urbana, an MAT from Lewis and Clark College, and an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Whittemore is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press, 2024). Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.

Whittemore was the 2020–21 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. In 2025, she was the third-place winner of the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize. About her third-place poem, the judges J. Drew Lanham and Dr. T. Jane Zelikova wrote:

“Future History of Earth’s Birds” is avian demise wrapped in thin shells, with the unhatched learning of horrible fates to come. It is kites at some pinnacle, or nadir of evolution, dropping fire onto a burning world that they didn’t ignite, while also providing humans with the field guide how-to instructions. Who’s to blame? The heart of it lies here: “Does it matter // what kind of birds did this? They’re all dead now.” These lines are solemn pronouncements of avian fate laid at the feet of humanity, which will suffer that same fate. No canaries were harmed during the writing of this poem, but our hearts heard them stop singing.

Whittemore teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University and lives in central Illinois.

Read about Amie Whittemore’s 2020 Poets Laureate Fellowship project.