If there’s one conviction that has followed Michelle Bitting throughout her life, it’s that “good things can come from terrible things.”

It’s an undercurrent found in all her work, including “Dummy Ventriloquist,” the new poetry chapbook Bitting will present at this year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

The title for “Dummy Ventriloquist” was inspired by a found poem Bitting wrote while wandering around the visual and auditory exhibit, “NOT I: Throwing Voices” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, composed of bits and pieces of what she saw and heard. In other pieces in her chapbook, she was “plugged in” to politics.

“I wrote a lot of these poems coming through the first presidency of [Donald Trump], and now we’re in that again … A lot of times you write things, and you wonder, ‘Where is this going to be in four years, or five years?’ But sadly, a lot of these are very much timely for now.”

Bitting also finds inspiration in her family history, her life in L.A. and especially her memories.

“We’re fractured,” Bitting said. “We’re fragmented. Things come through the body, and you have to put things back together in a way — literally re-member. The early [poems] were a lot of digging, excavating into my childhood and my growing up in Los Angeles, and suddenly looking at things and reflecting on them in a way that I hadn’t before.”

Despite the varied nature of her poetry inspiration, Bitting’s belief that loss can be made into art is often what guides her creatively.

After the Palisades Fire burned down her home, Bitting turned to writing. And while the fires completely upended her life, she looks on the bright side: Now, she has a “rumpus room,” a recreation room she’d always dreamed of having in her old Pacific Palisades home.

“Art comes from breakage. It just does,” Bitting said. “It doesn’t mean you have to have horrible trauma to be a great artist at all. But certainly, even if that’s not happening to you personally, it’s the artist’s job to be aware and plugged in to what’s going on.”

Gail Wronsky, a fellow poet, colleague and old friend of Bitting’s, admires Bitting’s ability to speak up and speak out. She describes Bitting’s poetry as “vivacious,” “intense” and “direct.”

“The thing I want to say about poetry is [that] we desperately need it,” Wronsky said. “Now more than ever, we need the poets to stand up and make themselves heard. And I think Michelle is one of the poets who’s doing that.”

Wronsky was working at Loyola Marymount University when she first heard Bitting’s sharp poetry. One poem was all it took to hook her — she recommended Bitting for an open poetry professor role, where Bitting has been working ever since.

“She has influenced me with her candor, you know?” Wronsky said. “Her absolute willingness to face the hard truths and just say them and deal with it in a poem.”

Bitting’s poems are intrinsically tied to her personal experiences, but they’re also highly universal, something David St. John, a fellow poet who met Bitting while she was an MFA student at Pacific University, commends.

“[Bitting is] both attentive to the world around her and to the details of her personal experience as well,” St. John wrote. “[Her] work is always informed by both her quiet intelligence and her deep empathy, and her ability to embrace both loss and celebration in her work seems to me a truly powerful element in all of her writing.”

Bitting echoed this emphasis in her writing. Hardship inspires her, and she doesn’t feel the need to talk around it.

“You have to not try to make it beautiful, let it be what it needs to be. It’s important to be brutal and blunt and honest,” Bitting said.

Today, Bitting is highly celebrated and recognized in the world of poetry. She has published six poetry collections and is the Poet Laureate of Pacific Palisades, among other achievements. But the road to getting there wasn’t a straight one.

When she was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Bitting studied theater, not poetry. But she came across poets Federico García Lorca and Dylan Thomas, and soon, the poetry began writing itself.

Now, she can’t imagine her life without it. Bitting lives and breathes poetry, both academically and professionally.

“When you think of an artist or just a really creative person, Michelle embodies that really well. [She’s definitely] a very supportive creative force on campus, she’s definitely very loved,” said Taylor Crowell, a student at LMU.

Poetry has an irreplaceable role in Bitting’s world. It’s more than a hobby — it’s a lifeline.

“You may not know this as an undergrad, you may not know this when you’re younger, but it will become clear to you as time goes on that you have to have this in your life … You have to be a writer because you just will die inside if you don’t,” Bitting said.

Bitting understands the power poetry holds, something bolstered by reading it aloud.

“You’ve got to read your poems out loud to your family, to your friends, to your dog, your cat, parakeet, whatever, because there’s just nothing like hearing the words. They come alive in the air, and when you’re reading for an audience, there are those moments where it clicks,” Bitting said.

Bitting will read from “Dummy Ventriloquist” on the Poetry Stage at 4:20 p.m. on Saturday at the Festival of Books.