Michael is a writer, editor, and educator based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
His poems appear or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Cincinnati Review, Greensboro Review, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, Narrative Magazine, Ninth Letter, North American Review, Oxford Poetry, and Third Coast. A 2026 MacDowell Fellow, 2025 Bread Loaf Scholar, Runner-Up for the Oxford Poetry Prize, and finalist for the American Literary Review Award, Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize, Narrative’s Annual Poetry Prize, and the Patricia Cleary Miller Award, he holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Poetry and received a Zell Fellowship. He has taught creative writing at the University of Michigan and Interlochen Arts Academy, where he was Visiting Poet in Residence. An Assistant Editor for Michigan Quarterly Review, he is currently at work on his debut collection.
Poems
“Vinery”, Oxford Poetry (forthcoming)
“Agnosticism”, North American Review (forthcoming)
“Pacifica”, The Iowa Review (forthcoming)
“Mortality Salience”, Third Coast (forthcoming)
“Against Logos”, Ninth Letter (print)
“The Iceman”, The Greensboro Review (print)
“On Praise”, The Missouri Review
“Aspen”, The Cincinnati Review
“Wyoming, February”, Best New Poets 2024 (print)
“Horse Thief”, Narrative Magazine
Awards &Honors
2025
MacDowell Fellowship (Spring/Summer 2026)
Second Prize, Oxford Poetry Prize, selected by Rebecca Tamás
Winner, Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
2024
Finalist, Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Poetry, The Missouri Review
Best New Poets 2024, selected by Anders Carlson-Wee
Finalist, American Literary Review Award for Poetry
Finalist, Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry, New Letters
Zell Postgraduate Fellowship in Poetry, University of Michigan, selected by Marie Howe and Major Jackson
2023
Finalist, Fifteenth Annual Poetry Contest, Narrative Magazine
Third-Place Winner (tie), Graduate Poetry Manuscript Hopwood Award, University of Michigan, judged by Eduardo C. Corral, Paul Tran, Stephanie Burt, and Paisley Rekdal
Finalist, Theodore Roethke Prize, University of Michigan, judged by Camille Rankine and Monica Youn