Mickie Kennedy (he/him) is a gay poet who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland with his family and a shy cat that lives under his son’s bed. He created and runs eReleases, a small business specializing in press release distribution.
His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, POETRY, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Foglifter, Nimrod, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist for the 2023 Pablo Neruda Prize, he earned an MFA from George Mason University. His first book of poetry, Worth Burning, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2026. His chapbook, Glandscapes, winner of the 2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Prize, will be available in September 2025.
Mickie’s poems dance and squirm, too slippery to pin down. They orbit a distinctly Southern family life, distorted by grief and abuse. They also examine the collision of sex and death, since the speaker’s sexuality was formed when AIDS was an unstoppable force. The work is balanced by an abiding sense of humor, an ironic queerness that punches space into the narrowest closets.
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WINNER of the 2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest
“Glandscapes is an incredibly moving collection, rich with the kind of up-close intimacy that covers such wide ground — parentage, beloveds, the self, survival and not. It builds a rich interior world that is clear and distinct to the speaker, but not isolating to you, the reader, who might want to walk through that world for a while. This book is a triumph, is massively generous, and also just plainly a pleasure to read.”
— Hanif Abdurraqib, author of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much
“With great precision and wit, Mickie Kennedy proves how the strongest people often use humor as a shield through life’s most devastating moments. Glandscapes is a triumph. Kennedy deftly fuses humor with both rawness and remedy. Comedy becomes the surprising yet necessary backdrop in the speaker’s reflections: the body through cancer, the most human desires of sex, inheritance through the queer identity, a history of lovers and families, and the larger failures of the medical industrial complex. This collection faces mortality right in the eye, then swerves us into the artistic: pornography reflects our deepest, dare I say, poetic fantasies; water turns into wine; and our speaker finds the gorgeous even in moments of betrayal. Kennedy is a master of the unexpected.”
— Dorothy Chan, author of Return of the Chinese Femme
“The considerable power of Mickie Kennedy’s Glandscapes lies in its brutality and playfulness, the deliciousness of its line breaks, the polyphonic voice brimming with the desire to believe, to be believed, to live. Brace yourself. Like the German nurse in the straight porn the speaker can’t stop watching, Kennedy’s poems give dispassionate, rigorous pleasure—and he won’t flinch when he snaps your neck.”
— Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer