Michael McGriff

Michael McGriff is an author, editor, and translator. He was born and raised in Coos Bay, Oregon, and attended the University of Oregon, The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, and Stanford University. He is the co-author, with J. M. Tyree, of the linked story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies, which was selected as one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014. His poetry collections include Early Hour, Black Postcards, Home Burial, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection, and Dismantling the Hills. He is the translator of Nobel laureate Tomas Traströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola and is the editor of a volume of David Wevill’s essential writing, To Build My Shadow a Fire. From 2009-2014 he published and edited Tavern Books, a nonprofit literary press dedicated to poetry in translation and the revival of out-of-print world classics. He is a former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and his work has been honored with a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry, Bookforum, The Believer, Tin House, American Poetry Review, and on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and PBS NewsHour. He has taught creative writing at Stanford University, The Michener Center for Writers, and Lewis & Clark College, and for several years has mentored young writers as a Visiting Writer at American International School in Vienna, Austria, and as a faculty member in the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop.

• Early Hour (Copper Canyon Press, 2017)
• Black Postcards (Willow Springs Books, 2017)
• Our Secret Life in the Movies, co-authored with J. M. Tyree (A Strange Object, 2014)
• Home Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2012)
• The Sorrow Gondola by Tomas Tranströmer, translated with Mikaela Grassl (Green Integer, 2010)
• To Build My Shadow a Fire: The Poetry and Translations of David Wevill, editor (Truman State University Press, 2010)
• Dismantling the Hills (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008)

Poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and literary translations have appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, Tin House, Bookforum, Poetry London, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and on PBS NewsHour and NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday.

• NPR Best Books of 2014 selection for Our Secret Life in the Movies. 
• BBC’s “Ten Books to Read in November” selection for Our Secret Life in the Movies, 2014. 
• 2013 Levis Reading Prize for Home Burial, Department of English, Virginia Commonwealth University.
• New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection for Home Burial, 2012.
• Lannan Literary Selection for Home Burial, 2012.
• Lannan Writer’s Residency, 2011.
• Lannan Literary Fellowship, 2010.
• Balcones Poetry Prize for Dismantling the Hills, 2009.
• National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (Poetry), 2009.
• Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Dismantling the Hills, 2007. 
• Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing, 2006-2008.
• James A. Michener Fellowship in Creative Writing, 2003-2006. 
• Roy Crane Award for Outstanding Work in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin, 2006.
• Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, The Poetry Foundation, 2005.
• C. Hamilton Bailey Poetry Fellowship, Literary Arts, 2003.

• Poetry and hybrid forms
• Poetry in translation
• Postwar European poetry
• The poetry of Tomas Tranströmer
• The writings of David Wevill