Michael Daley

Michael Daley was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts and is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and has an MFA from the University of Washington. He was publisher of Empty Bowl books in Port Townsend, Washington, from 1976 to 1982. His first collection of poems, The Straits, appeared in 1983. His translations are: Horace: Eleven Odes,  published at Brooding Heron Press, and Alter Mundus from the Italian of poet Lucia Gazzino, published by Pleasure Boat Studio. Rosehip Plum Cherry was published by Woodworks in Seattle in 2001, when two other chapbooks were released: The Corn Maiden from Tangram, and Original Sin from Pleasure Boat Studio. Among many other poetry publications, anthologies and websites, his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Alaskan Quarterly Review, Raven Chronicles, Seattle Review, North American Review, Rhino, Gargoyle, and on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He has received several grants and awards, but his favorite was a Fulbright teacher exchange that allowed him and his family to spend a year living in Hungary. In 2007 he published Way Out There: Lyrical Essays with Pleasure Boat Studio. In 2008 To Curve, his second full-length collection of poems, came out from Word Press in Cincinnati, and in 2010 Pleasure Boat Studio released Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest, including “Frankie the Milkman’s Song & Other Poems,” a CD funded by a grant from Artist Trust with music arranged and performed by Brad Killion. In 2016 Empty Bowl published his collection of poems, Of a Feather, and in July of 2020 Dos Madres published his fifth collection of poems, Born With. Cervena Barva published True Heresies, poems. Since 2017 he has again served as Empty Bowl's publisher, and is currently the Managing Editor of The Madrona Project, an anthology series. the first of which was a Festchrift for Clemens Starck, and the second, guest-edited by Holly J. Hughes, was entitled: Keep a Green Bough/Voices from the Heart of Cascadia. He is co-curator with Georgia Johnson of the Pelican Bay Books & Coffeehouse Poetry Reading Series in Anacortes, Washington, where he has lived since retiring from teaching English at Mount Vernon High School in 2012. In 2022 Dos Madres published his Reinhabited: New & Selected Poems and Pleasure Boat Studio published Telemachus, a novel. He also published the third issue of The Madrona Project: Human Communities in Wild Places, the fourth : Art in a Public Voice ; the fifth: The Universe is a Forest; the sixth: The Empty Bowl Cookbook, and forthcoming: To Love a Machine.