Michele Somerville has long worked as an educational activist with a special focus on disabilities education and justice in education.

The mother of three grown children, each of whom attended New York City Public Schools, Somerville has a special interest in New York City's public schools.

An award-winning poet and writer, Michele Somerville is the author of three books of verse, Black Irish, WISEGAL and Glamourous Life (forthcoming in 2018). Her bylines have appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Religion Dispatches et al,

During the 1980s, Somerville worked as a classroom teacher in the Bronx (NYC), teaching 1st and 6th grades; junior, sophomore, senior and A.P. English. Following that she taught writing at CUNY for almost a decade. Between 1991 and 1994, Somerville taught expository and creative writing at SUNY Purchase where she also sponsored creative senior theses. Somerville taught writing at Long Island University and St. Joseph's College during the 1990's as well.  

Since that time, Somerville has engaged extensively in community education as a volunteer while working as a tutor with children in grades 2 through 8 in all subject areas, and in the essay, test prep, with older students.

Somerville has worked as an after-school tutor (for six years at 826NYC) in Brooklyn, tutored as part of outreach with the Osborne Association, and in Brooklyn's John Jay Complex in Brooklyn.

Somerville was graduated with a B.A. in literature from Purchase College, holds a Masters in Fine Arts in Poetry from Brooklyn College and is currently a full-time Candidate for Masters of Theological Studies at Harvard.

Contract Michele Somerville at mmsnypoet@gmail.com. Follow Somerville on Twitter: @bored-o-ed.