Biography & Scholarship

Michael McGriff is an author, editor, and translator whose work centers on the intersection of surrealism with place, working-class life, and poverty in rural America. He was born and raised in Coos Bay, Oregon, and studied creative writing and literature at the University of Oregon, The Michener Center for Writers, 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 Inquest, Angel Sharpening its Beak, Eternal Sentences, Early Hour, Black Postcards, Home Burial, and Dismantling the Hills. He is the translator of Tomas Traströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola and 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 contemporary classics, including books by Eavan Boland, Nelly Sachs, Adrian C. Louis, Charles Simic, Ranier Maria Rilke, Tomas Tranströmer, David Wevill, Eunice Odio, William Stafford, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Natan Zach, and Else Lasker-Schüler. He is a former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and his work has been honored with a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice,” 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, Poetry London, and on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and PBS NewsHour online. 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. He serves as co-director of the creative writing program at the University of Idaho.

Link

Honors

White Pine Press Poetry Prize
White Pine Press, 2025
Miller Williams Poetry Prize
University of Arkansas Press, 2021
Levis Reading Prize
Virginia Commonwealth University (United States, Richmond) - VCU, 2013
New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice"
The New York Times, 2012
Lannan Literary Fellowship
Lannan Foundation, 2011
NEA Literary Fellowship
National Endowment for the Arts (United States, Washington) - NEA, 2010
Balcones Poetry Prize
Balcones Center for Creative Writing, 2009
Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007
Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship
Stanford University (United States, Stanford) - SU, 2006-2010
Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship
Poetry Foundation (United States, Chicago), 2005
James A. Michener Fellowship
The University of Texas at Austin (United States, Austin), 2003
C. Hamilton Bailey Poetry Fellowship
Literary Arts, 2003

Organizational Affiliations

Full Professor, English, College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences, University of Idaho

Education

Poetry and Fiction
2006, MFA, University of Texas at Austin
English
2003, BA, University of Oregon