Michelle Bitting                                                Poet

820 Bienveneda Avenue
Pacific Palisades, CA 90272
ph: 310-454-5478
fax: 310-454-5478
alt: 310-350-0155

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Michelle grew up in Los Angeles near the ocean.  A fourth generation Angeleno, she wrote poems in college at U.C. Berkeley where she studied theatre.  She enjoyed careers as a dancer and a chef before marrying Phil Abrams, the actor, and giving birth to their two beautiful children.  In 2001 she began writing and publishing in earnest often scribbling poems in parking lots while she waited for her eldest to finish school, her youngest asleep in the backseat. 
In addition to years of dance, music, and culinary arts training, Michelle has collaborated with the non-profit CDI (California Dance Institute) implementing a poetry component to their LAUSD inner city middle school performing arts program.  In 2010 she will intern with California Poets in the Schools.  Michelle has been involved in hands-on outreach to the sick, hungry, and homeless for over a decade.  To anyone interested in donating to an outstanding humanitarian aid program she suggests GAIA - the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance organization. 
Michelle will be teaching Creative Writing @ UCLA Extension
in Spring, 2010. 
She holds a MFA in Poetry from Pacific University, Oregon. 

Michelle's poems have been reprinted on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and have been published or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Cortland Review, diode, River Styx, Sou'wester, Glimmer Train, Swink, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Southeast, Southeast Review, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Passages North, Small Spiral Notebook, Many Mountains Moving, Gargoyle, Slipstream, Phoebe, Mudfish, Clackamas Literary Review, Dogwood, Rattle, Pearl, and others. 

She won the Glimmer Train Poetry Open (2003), the Poets on Parnassus (2004), and Rock and Sling's Virginia Brendemuehl (2005), poetry competitions.  Individual poems have been finalists for numerous national poetry contests as has her full length book "Good Friday Kiss."

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She is also pleased to announce that Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Blue Laws in December, 2007.

Click for review  The Cafe Review.

Click here to purchase

GOOD NEWS!
Thomas Lux chose Michelle's manuscript


"There is something about these poems that is so immediate, so unflinching, so focused and visceral in their understatement, that I was, on first reading, astonished.  On second reading I was astonished and deeply moved.  On third reading I was astonished, deeply moved, and filled
with joy!"
 --Thomas Lux,
De Novo Judge - 2008
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820 Bienveneda Avenue
Pacific Palisades, CA 90272
ph: 310-454-5478
fax: 310-454-5478
alt: 310-350-0155