Michael Daley

Poet, Creative Nonfiction Writer

Anacortes, WA
Washington US

Author's Bio

Michael Daley was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts and is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and has an MFA from the University of Washington. He was publisher of Empty Bowl books in Port Townsend, Washington, from 1976 to 1982. His first collection of poems, The Straits, appeared in 1983. His translations are: Horace: Eleven Odes,  published at Brooding Heron Press, and Alter Mundus from the Italian of poet Lucia Gazzino, published by Pleasure Boat Studio. Rosehip Plum Cherry was published by Woodworks in Seattle in 2001, when two other chapbooks were released: The Corn Maiden from Tangram, and Original Sin from Pleasure Boat Studio. Among many other poetry publications, anthologies and websites, his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Alaskan Quarterly Review, Raven Chronicles, Seattle Review, North American Review, Rhino, Gargoyle, and on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He has received several grants and awards, but his favorite was a Fulbright teacher exchange that allowed him and his family to spend a year living in Hungary. In 2007 he published Way Out There: Lyrical Essays with Pleasure Boat Studio. In 2008 To Curve, his second full-length collection of poems, came out from Word Press in Cincinnati, and in 2010 Pleasure Boat Studio released Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest, including “Frankie the Milkman’s Song & Other Poems,” a CD funded by a grant from Artist Trust with music arranged and performed by Brad Killion. In 2016 Empty Bowl published his collection of poems, Of a Feather, and in July of 2020 Dos Madres published his fifth collection of poems, Born With. Cervena Barva published True Heresies, poems. Since 2017 he has again served as Empty Bowl's publisher, and is currently the Managing Editor of The Madrona Project, an anthology series. the first of which was a Festchrift for Clemens Starck, and the second, guest-edited by Holly J. Hughes, was entitled: Keep a Green Bough/Voices from the Heart of Cascadia. He is co-curator with Georgia Johnson of the Pelican Bay Books & Coffeehouse Poetry Reading Series in Anacortes, Washington, where he has lived since retiring from teaching English at Mount Vernon High School in 2012. In 2022 Dos Madres published his Reinhabited: New & Selected Poems and Pleasure Boat Studio published Telemachus, a novel. He also published the third issue of The Madrona Project: Human Communities in Wild Places, the fourth : Art in a Public Voice ; the fifth: The Universe is a Forest; the sixth: The Empty Bowl Cookbook, and forthcoming: To Love a Machine.

Publications & Prizes

Creative Nonfiction

Books:
Way Out There: Lyrical Essays (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2007)
,
In Our Hearts & Minds: a Dalmo'ma Anthology of Northwest Writing about Central America (Empty Bowl Press, 1985)

Poetry

Books:
Born With (Dos Madres Press, 2020)
,
Of a Feather (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2016)
,
Alter Mundus (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2013)
,
Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2010)
,
To Curve (Word Press, 2008)
,
The Straits (Pleasure Boat Studio, 1983)
Chapbooks:
Rosehip Plum Cherry (Wood Works Press, 2002)
,
Original Sin (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2000)
Journals: ,
Raven Chronicles
, ,
Switched on Gutenberg
Prizes won: 

Seattle Arts Commission, Bumpershoot, Fessenden Foundation, National Endowment of Humanities, Fulbright, Artist Trust

Personal Favorites

Favorite authors: 
Dante, William Carlos Williams, Galway Kinnell, Denise Levertov, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, John Keats, Tu Fu, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Bowden, Charles Johnson, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Czeslaw Milosz, George Oppen, James Wright, Larry McMurtry, Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers, Evan Boland, James Wright, Joseph Stroud, Carl Dennis.
What I'm reading now: 
Don Quixote by Cervantes, The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown, The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth by Edited by Sam Hamill & Bradford Morrow, The Charles Bowden Reader by Charles Bowden, Field Light by Owen Lewis, The Phenomenon of Man by Teilhard de Chardin, Earthborn by Carl Dennis

More Information

Gives readings: 
Yes
Travels for readings: 
Yes
Identifies as: 
American
Prefers to work with: 
Adults, At Risk Youth, Naturalists/Environmentalists, Seniors, Teachers, Teenagers
Fluent in: 
English
Born in: 
Boston, MA
Massachusetts
Raised in: 
Dorchester, MA
Massachusetts
Please note: All information in the Directory is provided by the listed writers or their representatives.
Last update: Oct 14, 2023