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If you read a brochure or article from the UMass Amherst College of Engineering, you might discover a surprising nugget of poetry. That’s because Mikko Harvey, assistant director of communications and content strategy for the College of Engineering, is a poet, and recently received his second MacDowell Fellowship for poetry.

Founded in 1907, MacDowell is an artists-in-residence program that has supported 9,000 artists. “One of the traditions at MacDowell is that at the end of your residency, you write your name on one of these wooden tablets,” says Harvey. “It’s a record of everyone who has stayed in each studio.”

For his three-week stay, Harvey found himself in the same studio that writer James Baldwin occupied in 1954, 1958 and 1960. “He was writing Giovanni’s Room while he was there, and I was reading it while I was there. That creates this surreal, compressed sense of time. The studio has a fireplace, and you find yourself wondering: Did James Baldwin make a fire in the same fireplace I’m making one in now?” 

There are 31 writing, composing and visual art studios across the 450-acre rural countryside of Peterborough, New Hampshire. It’s a patchwork of new constructions as well as converted cabins, barns and other properties that the MacDowell Foundation has slowly acquired and turned into studios.

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The fellowship aims to provide artists the time and space to make art without distractions like work or even cooking or doing dishes. “They remove all of the obstacles that would normally interfere with your creative impulses,” explains Harvey. “You wake up in your studio, and you can get going immediately.”

“But for me as a poet, you also can’t just sit there and work on poems for 10 hours in a row, because they’re these small, delicate pieces,” he adds. “So, I went for a lot of walks, listened to a lot of music, did a lot of reading. And all of that tends to eventually flow back into the writing process somehow.”

Another distraction that the fellowship removes: there is no Wi-Fi access in the studios. 

Harvey’s second book, Let the World Have You (House of Anansi Press, 2022), contains several poems that he wrote during his first MacDowell fellowship in 2017. Nina MacLaughlin of The Boston Globe wrote of this work, “The language is forceful in its simplicity…conversational, and wallops with deep, intimate truth. There’s magic here, a towering and welcoming imagination, the best kind, the kind that takes your hand into strange places, knows that fear makes sense, and helps you see what’s here.”

Harvey hopes that some of his new MacDowell poems will make it into a third book of poetry.

More information about Harvey, including a sampling of his work and links to purchase his books, can be found at mikkoharvey.com.