Michelle Elvy is a writer, editor, manuscript assessor and creative writing teacher originally from the Chesapeake Bay area on the US east coast, now residing in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her poetry, fiction, essays and creative nonfiction have been published and placed in competitions in Aotearoa and internationally. She edits at At the Bay | I te Kokoru, a literary organisation dedicated to New Zealand’s storytelling traditions and innovative new voices. She is founding editor of Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and National Flash Fiction Day NZ, and Managing Editor for the acclaimed international Best Small Fictions series. She was previously review editor at Landfall and takahē. A Pushcart nominee, a Watson Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, a three-time finalist in the Glass Woman international writing competition, Michelle is also the recipient of a New Zealand Society of Authors/Auckland Museum Library grant and a New Zealand Society of Authors mentorship grant. In 2016, she was also short-listed for the Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship for her novel draft, and her story ‘Lost and Found in Berlin’ placed second in the Nivalis Short Story Competition.

Michelle has been involved in numerous festivals as either guest, chair, curator or editor, most recently: Centre for the Book, Dunedin, Katherine Mansfield House open day, NZSA Road Show, Word Christchurch (2024), Dunedin Writers & Readers Festival (2023 & 2021), Phantom Billstickers national campaign (2023 & 2022), Going West Literary Festival (2021) , Bath Flash Fiction (2021), National Poetry Day Dunedin (2021 -2024) and was invited to speak at the Auckland Writers’ Festival (May 2020). She has held various writing workshops and been much involved in Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature projects.

She has judged and presented for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and Fish Flash Fiction International Prize (2024) and the Michael Gifkins Prize for an unpublished Novel (2023 & 2024). Michelle has also been a mentor for the NZ Society of Authors programme (adult and youth) since 2019 and been guest judge in past years for: Dunedin Writers’ Workshop, South Island Writers’ Association, the International Writers’ Workshop, the Whangārei Poetry Walk, NorthWrite’s collaboration competition, NYC Challenge, Reflex Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash 500, Bath Flash Fiction Award, Bath Novella-in-Flash Award, and the At the Bay Sparkling Prose Competition. She has tutored for the School for Young Writers, Christchurch, the LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore (since 2022) and was on the selection panel for the Lilian Ida Smith Award 2021.

Her first book the everrumble, is a poetic imagining of intense focus and sweeping ideas described by Catherine McNamara as ‘an infused and accomplished accumulation of being, a loving homage to our beleaguered planet’ and ‘a tour de force’ by Christopher Allen. Longlisted in The Guardian‘s Not-The-Booker Prize and featured in Verb Festival (Wellington)’s digital programme, the everrumble is described by Tracey Slaughter as ‘luminous… taking our senses on a journey of ‘orchestral movement’.

Michelle’s second work, the other side of better, is a hybrid collection of small fictions that criss-crosses the line between truth and fiction, prose and poetry, past and future.  Paula Morris describes the book as ‘[w]ell-turned stories, rich with wit and detail, that explore the spaces between people and places’ whereas Erik Kennedy states this is ‘a collection that surprises not just because it can, but because it understands the surprises of the world.’

Her anthology work is extensive and includes A Kind of Shelter Whakaruru-taha, edited with Witi Ihimaera (Massey University Press 2023), and Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand, edited with Paula Morris and James Norcliffe (Otago University Press 2020). Her most recent anthology is Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages, edited with Vaughan Rapatahana (The Cuba Press 2025). This sparkling new collection brings more than 40 languages together, story by story, highlighting the beautifully complex realities of Aotearoa’s multicultural and multilingual society.

Following her recent Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages, Michelle also released Short/Poto (Massey University Press, 2025), one hundred short, short stories in English and te reo Māori, edited with Kiri Piahana-Wong.

‘Michelle Elvy needs no more than this, the smallest white spaces in which to swim the waters between story and poem with humour, colour, imagination and a sharp grace’ (Tania Hershman).

 

Links

Author website

NZSA author page

Massey University Press writer page

At the Bay | I te Kokoru books: https://atthebay.org/books/

Flash Frontier website

National Flash Fiction Day website

ANZRB review of Short/Poto (August, 2025)

Rachel Dore interview ‘Words from the bubble’ (March, 2024)

Guest interview at Irish journal SPLONK (April, 2023)

Interview on judging the Bath Novella-in-flash award (June, 2022)

Bath Flash Fiction Award interview discussing the other side of better (August, 2021)

Radio NZ interview discussing the other side of better (June, 2021)

Radio NZ interview discussing anthology Ko Aotearoa Tatou, We are New Zealand, born out of mosque attacks looks at what it means to be Kiwi (December, 2020)

Radio NZ interview on National Flash Fiction Day 10-year anniversary (June, 2020)

Nancy Stohlman interview discussing the everrumble (January, 2020)