Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer, youth worker, and organizer. He has received grants and scholarships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Winner of the Scotti Merrill Award for poetry from the Key West Literary Seminar, his poetry has appeared in Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Poetry Northwest, Copper Nickel, and Best New Poets 2018 among others.
Michael has worked as a dishwasher, a farmhand, a teaching artist, a social studies teacher, and case manager for youth experiencing homelessness. He is currently an MFA candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at Cornell University and splits his time between Ithaca, NY and North Minneapolis. His first book, The Only Worlds We Know (Button Poetry) is now available.                     

         
​For booking: Michaelleepoet@gmail.com

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Buy the book here

The Only Worlds We Know is, as Michael Lee writes, an “act of remembering like sharpening a blade until the blade is gone.”  Memory is shaped with a resolve that is without resolution in these moving marvelous poems. They beautifully track what happens when unspeakable grief refuses to be silent: erasures map "the grammar of mourning," bullets blossom into seeds, and tender elegies blossom into resilient odes alerting us to the world. 

-Terrance Hayes
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“Michael Lee has found newly slanted and richly tinged ways to write about some of the crucial subjects—love and love lost, recovery and addiction, the bullet and the pill.  His clean lines and nothing-to-hide voice will startle and edify his lucky readers. No wonder he writes 'For my final wish, another/ final wish,' wishing to keep writing poems forever."

-Billy Collins

"The worlds presented in Michael Lee’s The Only Worlds We Know often exist in the presence or aftermath of grief, violence, addiction, long Minnesota winters, and “enough funerals to swear off church for good.”  These are not easy poems, and Lee offers no easy solutions. Instead, we find a poet who wrestles these anxieties, not to resolve them, but to find a way to exist alongside them. Yes, there’s wreckage here, but also “words that carry us into the dark and then beyond it.” Indeed, these words will carry you. This is a striking debut collection—a voice that feels urgent, honest, and earned."

​-Matthew Olzmann

​Interview with the Harvard Education Magazine 

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