Michael Dickman, Lewis Center for the Arts

Lecturer in Creative Writing

Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

About

Michael Dickman is the author of The End of the West (2009); Flies, winner of the 2011 James Laughlin Award; 50 American Plays (2012), co-written with his brother, Matthew Dickman; Green Migraine (2015); Brother (2016), and Days & Days (2019), which the New York Times listed as a Best Poetry Book of 2019. His most recent poetry collection, Pacific Power & Light, will be published by Knopf in February 2024.

His poetry breathes in the entire world, it's delights, cruelty, boredom, and griefs, and breathes out a prayer, one that holds both grace and suffering, equally, lightly. "There is only this world and this world // What a relief / created // over and over." Franz Wright calls him a young poetic genius with a "style like no one else's" and elucidates, "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."

Dickman was born and raised in the Lents neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. He has received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Vermont Studio Center, and he won the 2008 Narrative Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Field, Tin House, Narrative Magazine and others. He has been profiled in Poets & Writers and in The New Yorker, with his twin brother, poet Matthew Dickman.