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 and featured on Weekend Edition Sunday. His poetry collections include Inquest, Angel Sharpening its Beak, Eternal Sentences, 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 Tranströmer’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 PBS NewsHour. Prior to the University of Idaho, he taught creative writing at Stanford University, The Michener Center for Writers, Lewis & Clark College, and Wichita State University. For several years he 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.

• Inquest (White Pine Press, 2025)
• Angel Sharpening its Beak (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025)
• Eternal Sentences (University of Arkansas Press, 2021)
• 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)

Professor McGriff’s poetry, fiction, essays, and literary translations have appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, Tin House, Bookforum, Poetry London, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Orion, New England Review, Harvard Review, The Wall Street Journal: Speakeasy, and PBS NewsHour.

• White Pine Press Poetry Prize for Inquest, 2024
• Miller Williams Poetry Prize for Eternal Sentences, 2021
• 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, Prose, and Hybrid Forms
• Postwar Literature in Translation
• The Literature of Tomas Tranströmer and David Wevill
• Surrealism and Deep Image Poetics
• Literary Depictions of Class, Work, Place, and Rurality
• Literary Editing, Print Culture, and Book Design