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Bio

Michael Steffen is the author of three collections of poetry. His first, No Good at Sea, was published by Legible Press in 2002. His second, Heart Murmur, was released in 2009 by Bordighera Press. His third, Bad Behavior, was published by Brick Road Poetry Press in 2012. Michael was granted a 2002 Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and has had poems appear in a wide variety of journals including Poetry, Potomac Review, The Ledge, Poet Lore, Rhino, Smartish Pace and many others. He has read widely throughout New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Massachusetts. Michael is a Y2K graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Vermont College and currently lives in Lancaster, New York.

Full Name

Michael Steffen

Locations

Erie

Author's Timeline

2002

LITWORK

No Good At Sea
Legible Press
0-9715145-0-X
"Like the Friday night he writes about, Mike Steffen's poems are exhilarating. Through their fluid syntax and rich lexicon, they provide us with a metonymic index of American culture ��� as sharp as the edge between bitter and sweet."���Natasha Saj��.

2009

LITWORK

Heart Murmur
Bordighera Press
978-1-59954-012-2 (Softcover) / 978-1-59954-013-9 (Hardcover)
"Heart Murmer is an electric storm of language running a gauntlet of feeling from grief to gallows humor that left me astonished. Steffen burns the solipsistic personal at the stake." ���Roger Weingarten.

2012

LITWORK

Bad Behavior
Brick Road Poetry Press
978-0-9835304-5-9
"Bad Behavior catalogs the range and shades of our shared humanity. Michael Steffen���s unblinking gaze is often ironic, which makes his capacity for tenderness even more impressive, as he gives voice to a flood-ruined farmer at a pawn shop, or imagines a convict���s botched execution, a worker having to listen to himself being fired in corporate double-speak, or shows us a son caring for his ill mother. Steffen imagines the past with its unfixable wrongs ���stalking us, bumming cigarettes/wearing holes in its shoes,��� as if to suggest it is ourselves we give to or refuse. And it is indeed ourselves these poems give back to us, newly tenacious, tenuous and aware." ���Betsy Sholl, author, most recently, of Rough Cradle (Alice James Books, 2009).

2013

RESIDENCE

Mr. Steffen lives in Erie County in New York State.

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