Freesia McKee (she/her) writes about the influence of personal and collective histories on how we experience place. She served as the Fall Poet in Residence at Ripon College. She is a white settler who lives on the ancestral homelands of the Menominee and Ho-Chunk nations, and she grew up nearby, in Milwaukee.

The book of poetry Freesia is currently writing deals with caregiving, (re)defining the Midwest, and the limits of language’s ability to describe land and relationship. In addition to poetry, Freesia’s writing practice includes hybrid-genre work, lyric essays, memoir, flash fiction, book reviews, and literary criticism.

Freesia’s words have appeared in Plume, 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 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, queerness, 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 a regular newsletter on poetry, micro-memoir, and the writing life. Join her mailing list here.