Check out Freesia’s most recently published poetry chapbook: Hummingbird Vows from Bottlecap Press.

Freesia McKee (she/her) writes poetry, hybrid-genre work, lyric essays, memoir, flash fiction, book reviews, and literary criticism that make connections between history, gender, genre, and place. She serves as an Assistant Professor of English, specializing in poetry, at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. In the fall semester of 2022, she served as the Poet in Residence at Ripon College. She is a white settler who lives on the homelands of the Ho-Chunk and Menominee nations, and she grew up in Milwaukee.

Freesia is currently writing a memoir-in-essays that takes place in South Florida. The book of poetry she drafted while Poet in Residence considers multiple Midwests, queerness in rural spaces, and interspecies kinship. Freesia’s written work engages with radical compassion, care, community, and ecology.

Freesia’s words have appeared in Plume, Fugue, Cleaver Magazine, About Place Journal, The Ploughshares Blog, So to Speak, Gertrude, Bone Bouquet, CALYX, Nimrod, Painted Bride Quarterly, Huffington Post, New Verse News, Lavender Review, Pleiades Book Review, and many other venues. Freesia won the 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry from Cutbank. In 2020, Freesia won a Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry through the Academy of American Poets. Headmistress Press published Freesia’s first chapbook How Distant the City.

Freesia earned an MFA in poetry from Florida International University and a BA in Gender & Women’s Studies from Warren Wilson College. More than seventy students have participated in Freesia’s online micro-memoir classes. Freesia also serves as a writing coach and a freelance editor.

Freesia regularly offers writing workshops to the public through local and virtual community organizations. She loves teaching and being in community. The writers in Freesia’s classes are crafting stories of love and justice, family, otherness, survival, violence, identity formation, childhood, ecology, experimentation, creative risk-taking, the nature of being an artist, and more. See Freesia’s list of upcoming events and classes to learn what’s coming up.

Freesia writes an occasional newsletter on poetry, micro-memoir, and the writing life. Join her mailing list here.