James McMichael

1939 –

On July 19, 1939, James McMichael was born in Pasadena, California and received his Ph.D. at Stanford University. He is the author of several poetry collections, including If You Can Tell: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016); Capacity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry; and The World at Large: New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press, 1996).

About his book-length poem, Four Good Things (Mariner Books, 1980), Robert Pinsky wrote: "One of the great American poems. Beautiful and profound, its subject is the modern conundrum of the human ability to plan, invent and construct, and the stifling, destructive consequences."

McMichael was the 2007 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. His other honors include a Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award, the Arthur O. Rense Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America.

The poet C.K. Williams has said: "James McMichael has for many years been one of our most innovative poets, with a broad thematic range, and a passionate commitment to the truths of life and art. His poems are at once as capacious as novels, formally inventive, and emotionally profound." He is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California at Irvine.