About Michele
Michele Battiste is the 2026-28 Poet Laureate of Lafayette, Colorado. She is also the author of four poetry books (and an oracle deck!): The Elsewhere Oracle (Black Lawrence, 2026), Waiting for the Wreck to Burn (Trio House, 2019), Uprising (Black Lawrence, 2014), and Ink for an Odd Cartography (Black Lawrence, 2009). She has also published several chapbooks, including Left: Letters to Strangers (Grey Book, 2014). Her poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals, including American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, Memorious, and Women's Studies Quarterly, among others.
Michele has taught writing workshops across the US, and her career has been supported with grants, fellowships, and residencies from Blue Mountain Center, Good Hart Artists Residency, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Wichita State University, the Center for the American West, the Jerome Foundation, and the NY State Senate. She lives in Colorado where she works for The Nature Conservancy, raising money to tackle climate change and protect nature.
Battiste’s The Elsewhere Oracle bridges lyric, artifact, and instrument. It stands among the most original poetry projects of the year: an invitation to listen differently, to draw a card, to begin again.
- Amanda Auchter, Rhino, and author of The Wishing Tomb
Battiste provides readers with an opportunity for self-discovery and transformation, to find meaning and paths forward, to locate wisdom in the face of uncertainty [...].
- Hua Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
Michele Battiste reminds us of the here that is always here but often obscured behind shadows, polished surfaces, and our own reluctance to see.
- Megan Kaminski, author of Prairie Divination and Gentlewoman
And like Nin Andrews, she is a poet who chronicles the subtlest nuances of dissolution with an exhilarating dark humor and sharp agile mind that surprises the reader with every twist and turn of thought.
- Jeff Friedman, author of Ashes in Paradise
