ABOUT

Michelle Elvy is writer, editor, reviewer and creative writing teacher, originally from the Chesapeake Bay on the US east coast, now living in Ōtepoti Dunedin, in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. Her editing experience varies from very short fiction and poetry to novels and essays. She is particularly adept at experimental boundary-hopping forms. She works as a mentor and private tutor with a range of writers.

Michelle’s books are the small novel in small forms, the everrumble, the hybrid short story collection, the other side of better, and the forthcoming poetry collection, ocean sky marble eye. Her anthology work includes, most recently, Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages (2025), Poto! Iti te kupu, nui te kōrero | Short! The big book of small stories (2025), A Shellprint of Waves (2025), Perch: Otepoti Dunedin Poems (2024) and A Kind of Shelter: Whakaruru-taha (2023). Much of Michelle’s work is collaborative and across genres; recent work includes the installation ‘The Wild Edge’, featuring poetry, found seaside objects and woodblock prints, and the curated annual emerging writer series in Ōtepoti Dunedin, with new micros and poems paired with visual artwork.

Michelle is founder of National Flash Fiction Day NZ and Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction, as well as AT THE BAY | I TE KOKORU. She is Managing Editor of the international Best Small Fictions series and has been Reviews Editor at Landfall and takahē. She teaches creative writing in one-day workshops, 8-week sessions and up to a year online at 52|250 A Year of Writing. Course subjects include Memoir, Historical Fiction, Humour, Intro to Poetry, Experimental Storytelling, Creative Nonfiction and the Novella-In-Flash.

Once upon a time Michelle was an historian specialising in German History; her MA is from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. A Fulbright scholar and Watson Fellow, she is also a three-time Pushcart nominee and recipient of the NZSA / Auckland Museum Library grant and the NZSA Mentorship programme award. She has been shortlisted in the Grimshaw Sargeson Award and twice in the Sargeson Short Story Prize. In 2024 she won the IWW Short Story Prize; in 2023 she was Highly Commended in the Kathleen Grattan Award for a Sequence of Poems; in 2025 she was shortlisted in the Grattan Award for a full manuscript of poetry. In 2025 she was awarded two residencies for her poetry and creative nonfiction.

Michelle has lived in Europe, Canada, Mexico and the South Pacific. She is fluent in German. In 2008 she sailed to Aotearoa New Zealand aboard her sailboat, her home for many years. She sailed between Mexico and French Polynesia, Hawai‘i and the Pacific Northwest, Southeast Asia and the African continent; her travels took her to distant places such as the South Atlantic’s St Helena and Ascension Island, the Indian Ocean’s Madagascar and Lamu, and capes as different as Cabo San Lucas and the Cape of Good Hope. She once spent 44 days at sea on her first equator crossing, a Christmas with Komodo dragons, a summer moving with currents and tide of the Inside Passage to Alaska and a few days transiting the Panama Canal.

 

Affiliations

Academy of New Zealand Literature

New Zealand Society of Authors

• member since 2011; Chair, Otago Southland branch, 2023-26
• Mentoring and Manuscript Assessors programme since 2020

New Zealand Association of Manuscript Assessors

National Flash Fiction Day Central Committee. 2012-present

National Poetry Day Dunedin – event curator, 2022-25