Mitchell Nobis is a writer, a teacher, a dad with a thousand stories about their journey to adopt two incredible boys, an aging rec-league basketball player held together by duct tape, a transplanted farmboy, a former drummer, and probably some other things. He lives in Metro Detroit with his wife and children and the family dog.

He has a number of poems and teacher essays out in the world and novels in draft. His poetry collection Beginning to Sense is forthcoming from ELJ Editions (2025). His other two poetry manuscripts are still looking for publishers, but his first manuscript was a finalist for the 2020 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, a runner-up for the 2019 Hopper Poetry Prize, and a semi-finalist for the 2017 Philip Levine Prize.

He hosts Wednesday Night Sessions, the KickstART Farmington reading series. For years he tweeted jokes about not being able to attend the AWP writers conference and attending “Not at AWP” instead while doing laundry. Then Jared Beloff said “Let’s make that a thing,” and they co-founded NAWP. He is a poetry reader for Bracken Magazine and has guest-edited at other literary magazines. He has an MA in teaching English but no MFA. He took a couple of creative writing classes at the local community college once, though.

He is a past president of the Michigan Council of Teachers of English and a former co-director of the Red Cedar Writing Project, where he led dozens of professional learning events for teachers of writing. He created the RCWP Writers Workshop and facilitated it for its first eight years. He now facilitates the Teachers as Poets group for the National Writing Project in the online Write Now Teacher Studio space. He co-authored Real Writing: Modernizing the Old School Essay, a book for writing teachers.

Find him on Twitter, Bluesky, or Instagram (and probably some others) at @MitchNobis.

© 2024 Mitchell Nobis