Mindy Nettifee discovered poetry and its various "scenes" just two weeks shy of being old enough to be arrested in the state of California. She was featured on the cover of NEXT magazine when she was 15, and went on to become a Grand Slam Champion of the Long Beach/Orange County Poetry Slam, competing on and coaching teams at 5 National Poetry Slam Competitions. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Social Sciences from Chapman University and served for five years on the Five Penny Poets advisory board of literary nonprofit Tebot Bach. She currently directs the poetry nonprofit Write Now Poetry Society (www.writenowpoets.org).
Mindy connects with audiences of all kinds. Her writing benefits from over 12 years of performing and from scouring the public libraries of 6 different states. She spends many late nights being brainwashed by Bob Hicock and Tony Hoagland, from which she recovers by reading McSweeny’s Lists, cooking pots of soup and watching underwater documentaries and anything narrated by Richard Attenborough.
She has toured poetry shows and festivals both nationally and internationally performing her work on stages from Hawaii to New York to Munich, sharing stages with performance poetry luminaries Derrick Brown, Buddy Wakefield, Roger Bonair-Agard, Beau Sia, Bucky Sinister, and Amber Tamblyn, and literary luminaries Jeffrey McDaniel, Wanda Coleman, Jack Hirschman and more. She has been a headlining poet for GirlFest Hawaii, and was recently was chosen as one of the inaugural performers for the critically acclaimed show and poetry concert film/documentary The Drums Inside Your Chest. She was honored as a 2008 Newer Poets of Los Angeles, chosen by the Los Angeles Poetry Festival and Venice's revered Beyond Baroque. She joined the 2009 Elephant Engine High Dive Revival Tour and now knows more than she used to about the ukulele.
Mindy has published five chapbooks through independent small presses such as The Inevitable Press, Instagon and Jinx Publications and in 2006 published her first full length collection Sleepyhead Assassins on Moon Tide Press. Her work has been featured in ISM magazine and the California Poetry Anthology. Her poem "Metal Detectors And Other Important Thershholds" was a nominee for the Pushcart Prize. She currently writes from the foggy shores of Long Beach, California.
What others have to say about Mindy and Sleepyhead Assassins:
“Mindy Nettifee is the future of poetry.”
-Bob Holman, poet and proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club dubbed Poetry Czar of New York City
"When award-winning Long Beach poet Mindy Nettifee speaks...you’re powerless—you have no choice but to raise your wine glass high over your osmosis head and join her pledge of allegiance to graphic truth. Her poems have the grace of cursive letters and the guts of a truck driver."
-District Weekly
“Mindy Nettifee is destined to be the next Dorothy Parker.”
-Poetic Diversity
“Sleepyhead Assassins is extremely satisfying, the culmination of an escalating potential that is only now beginning to come into its own.”
-OC Weekly
“Mindy Nettifee chooses powerful material and addresses it from a place of strength and stillness….Her poems have staying power.”
-Poetix
“Mindy Nettifee makes you want to cut out her ready eyes and put them in your own sockets so you can collect all that her poetry has made you imagine. She will make you reminisce of places you have never been. You will travel on her nightmares. Mindy is one of the most powerful, vaginal and visceral forces in contemporary American literature.”
-Derrick Brown, Individual Poetry Slam Champion and author of Born In The Year of the Butterfly Knife and I Love You Is Back
“That moment at which the body arches parenthesis just before orgasm. Nettifee’s poems give you that. Not just metaphor and device, not just ‘le mot juste’ or the recognizable meter of the air we breathe, she dissects the most intimate moments and what she returns to you is at once explanation and surprise – the clarity of everything that makes us, us. And when this unfolds Mindy conjures something beautiful and immediately recognizable as wonderful art.”
-Roger Bonair-Agard, two-time National Slam Champion and author of Tarnish and Masquerade
“Mindy Nettifee reminds me what I came here for. Something brilliant.”
-Buddy Wakefield, two-time Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and author of Live for a Living
“The poems in Sleepyhead Assassins have the patience, grace and music of a friend who has listened to the world carefully and for a long time. Because Mindy Nettifee understands compassion is a kind of intelligence and has the gifts to make you laugh even as your heart is breaking, her poems achieve a rare and necessary American wisdom. A brilliant debut.
-Patrick Rosal, author of Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive and My American Kundiman.
