Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1975, Michael Dickman, his twin brother Matthew, and his younger sister were raised by their mother in the neighborhood of Lents. He earned a BA at the University of Oregon and received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. He now teaches poetry at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.
His many grants, fellowships, and residencies include honors from organizations such as the Michener Center for Writers, the Vermont Studio Center, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Lannan Foundation, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. He was awarded the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University for 2009-2010.
Dickman’s first collection of poetry, The End of the West, was published in 2009 by Copper Canyon Press. His second collection, Flies (Copper Canyon Press, 2011), received the 2010 James Laughlin Award. He is also the author of Green Migraine (Copper Canyon Press, 2015), Brother (Faber & Faber, 2016), and the coauthor, with his brother, of 50 American Plays (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Field, Tin House, and Narrative Magazine and others. He has been profiled in Poets & Writers and in The New Yorker, with his twin brother, poet Matthew Dickman.
Franz Wright calls him a young poetic genius with a “style like no one else’s . . . with the utmost gravity as well as a kind of cosmic wit. Michael Dickman’s poems give a voice to the real life sorrows, horrors, and indomitable joys which bind together the vast human family.”
Read more about Michael Dickman and his work here.