Aimee Noel lives with her wife in Dayton, Ohio, and works as an educator. Drawing on growing up in Buffalo, NY, she tends toward working class poetry, has been published in journals such as Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Ilanot Review, Ecotone, and Provincetown Arts. Her work has been featured on WYSO’s Conrad’s Corner, an NPR affiliate. She volunteered as a count coordinator for the VIDA Count, highlighting gender disparity in the literary arts, co-founded the McPherson Community Garden, and was part of the marketing committee founding The Gem City Market, a co-op grocery store in the food desert of Dayton’s West Side.
She earned her MFA from Lesley University in Cambridge, was chosen as Ohio Arts Council’s Summer Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has twice been awarded OAC's Individual Excellence Award for poetry.
IN HER OWN WORDS
No one chooses their perspective, certainly, but at 50, I’m still unsettled in mine. I occupy many spaces at once. My writing reflects the duplicitous space someone occupies in a family, a job, or a community, and the void created when they leave. I grew up in, and am growing away from, a blue-collar background near Buffalo, NY. Being the first in my family to go away to college, I hold a blurred space between the working class and those with advanced degrees. I’m not quite home in either space; I find myself code-switching when I’m back in Buffalo, and when I’m home, in Dayton, trying to convince myself I’ve earned the academic currency to live my current life. Blue-collar families, the ways in which society views them, and the ways in which the working class views those who “defect” is my fodder. I explore these injustices, hypocrisies, and camaraderie through poetry. In doing so, I’m also exploring my personal world and what it means to be “home.”
