Michelle currently lives in LA. She is a filmmaker and photographer, prefers images over words. She is always striving to be better, while learning how to be kind to herself.

Kim Noriega was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and she moved to Southern California in her late 20’s. She is the author of the book, Name Me (Fortunate Daughter Press, 2010), the title poem of which was a finalist for the Joy Harjo Prize in Poetry. Her poem “Heaven, 1963” was featured in Ted Kooser’s syndicated column, “American Life in Poetry.” Her poem “Postcard to My Younger Self Beneath the Apple Trees” was a finalist for the 2016 Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. Noriega teaches creative writing to all ages in recovery homes and public libraries, most recently in conjunction with the inaugural issue of the Kids! San Diego Poetry Annual (Garden Oak Press, 2017). She lives in San Diego with her husband and daughter, where she heads San Diego Public Library’s family literacy program.

Visible Poetry Project typically asks filmmakers to interpret poems and to turn them into short films; we also wanted to know what the reverse might look like. For this video, Kim Noriega created an original poem based on a short film directed by Michelle Tsiakaros, and recited it as a voiceover for the video. Kim writes, "I felt strongly about working within the framework of the film, in essence using it as a strict poetic form. This forced me to focus on compression and diction, which of course is true in poetry anyway, but with the images already chosen, there were limitations other than just space. I had to think in new ways. The reverse-visual poetry process was exacting and exciting. I feel like both the film and the poem stand alone and are more than the sum of their parts together. "