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, 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; 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 contemporary 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, Poetry London, 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. He is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Idaho.

"It's McGriff's] language that keeps you reading along, transfixed."--New York Times Book Review
"A lyricist at heart, McGriff is a masterful maker of metaphor." --Third Coast
"McGriff's vivid grit remains hard to gainsay."--Publishers Weekly

"A lyricist at heart, McGriff is a masterful maker of metaphor."--Third Coast
"There is majestic beauty in these descriptions, and it is clear that McGriff honors this place as a place--not as mere setting, but as a distinct element of his verse."--Gently Read Literature
The Sorrow Gondola was the great Swedish poet Tomas Transtr mer's first collection of poems after his stroke in 1990. Translated by Michael McGriff, Transtr mer's great work is available in its first single-volume English edition.
Tomas Transtr mer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011.
This collection showcases the creative range and essential writing of David Wevill, an elusive and enigmatic poetic figure. His work shines among a generation of postwar poets known for their literary invention, dissemination of poetry in translation, political witness, and obsession with the image. Wevill is a careful observer of the details of life both as pilgrim and exile.

WINNER OF THE 2007 AGNES LYNCH STARRETT POETRY PRIZE