Alysse Gopalakrishnan

Alysse Gopalakrishnan, PhD

Alysse Gopalakrishnan, PhD

Associate Professor, English
970-569-2909 | agopalakrishnan@coloradomtn.edu
Pronouns: She/Her

2023 CMC Faculty of the Year, Vail Valley

Education

  • PhD, English, Oklahoma State University
  • MFA, Writing and Literature, Bennington College
  • BA, Art History, Smith College

Publications

  • FishWife, Black Lawrence Press, March 2024, winner of the 2025 Colorado Book Award in poetry
  • Pentimento, winner of the 2017 Gold Line Press Chapbook Competition, March 2019

Recent Conference Presentations:

  • Pop Culture Association Annual Conference, April 10, 2026, as part of the Poetry Studies & Creative Poetry panel Elegy, Epistemology, and Etiology: How and Why We Poeticize and Narrativize, Atlanta, Georgia.
  • Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Annual Conference, February 28, 2026, as part of the creative writing panel Our Heads Are Full of Ghosts, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
  • Creative Writing Studies Conference: Relatable! Exploring Difference & Relationality in Creative Writing Studies, November 7, 2025, as part of the panel This Speaks to Me: Inspired Prompts, Workshop Tricks, and Other Methods of Finding Voice Together in the Creative Writing Classroom, virtual.
  • Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 76th Annual Convention, October 14, 2023, as part of the panel Writing Trauma Survival, Practicing Writing Rituals to Preempt and Process Trauma: CAConrad’s Poetics, Denver.
  • Arts and Humanities Graduate Colloquium: On the Brink: Borders, Transitions, and the Body, February 25, 2022, as part of the craft panel Freedom as Literary Ecotone: Ecowriting Along Borders of Poetry / Prose and Non / Human Communities, virtual.
  • Creative Writing Studies Conference: Creative Writing as Care & Other Lessons of the Pandemic, October 2021, as part of the workshop Ritual and Wonder: Methods of Reopening and Unsilencing the Workshop, virtual.

Personal Interests

I love working with students to celebrate their curiosity and to cultivate their inner writers and readers!

Family

My husband and I spend most of our time tending to our animal menagerie, keeping houseplants alive, and exploring the BLM trails near our home.