about mick (they/she)
m. mick powell is a queer Black Cabo Verdean femme, poet, artist, educator, and the author of DEAD GIRL CAMEO (One World/Random House), winner of the 2026 Stonewall Book Award and listed as a Best Book of the Year by the New York Public Library and Debutiful.
mick's work situates Black queer femme existence and experience as rupture, revolution, revelation, and revival. They are the author of the chapbooks threesome in the last Toyota Celica (winner of the Host Publications Chapbook Prize, Fall 2023) and chronicle the body (winner of Yemassee Journal's second Annual Chapbook Contest, 2019). Their poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and a Pushcart Prize and have been published in Split Lip, RHINO, Indiana Review, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere.
For their poetry, mick has been awarded a 2026 Yaddo residency, a 2025 Get the Word Out fellowship from Poets & Writers, a 2024 fellowship from Torch Literary Arts, a 2023 Tin House Residency, a research award from the Barnard Library, writing fellowships from the Hurston/Wright Foundation and the Ruth Stone House, and several other recognitions.
From 2019 - 2026, mick was an Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, where she was awarded the AAUP Early Career Teaching Excellence Award in 2022. They currently teach at Bay Path University in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing Program and at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in Crime and Justice Studies.
mick is represented by Amanda Orozco and Noelle Falcis-Math at
mick is an Aries sun, Leo moon, and Sag rising. They enjoy roller skating, chasing waterfalls, and being in love.
Photograph by Deilyn Foster