Richard Michelson

Richard Michelson (he/him) is the author of the poetry collections Sleeping as Fast as I Can (Slant Books, 2023), More Money than God (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), Battles & Lullabies (University of Illinois Press, 2006), Tap Dancing for the Relatives (University Press of Florida, 1985), and two collaborations, Semblant (1996) and Masks (1999), with the artist Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press.

Michelson is the winner of a National Jewish Book Award, two Sydney Taylor Gold Medals from the Association of Jewish Libraries, and two Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowships. His work was chosen to represent the Commonwealth of Massachusetts at the Library of Congress National Book Festival, and in 2019 he won the Samuel Minot Jones Award for Literary Achievement. 

Michelson’s poetry has appeared in anthologies including What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Curbstone Books, 2019), the Norton Introduction to Poetry,7th ed. (1998), Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Northwestern University Press, 1998), and Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (Penguin Books, 1994).

In addition to his poetry collections, Michelson wrote the libretto for the off-Broadway music-theater piece Dear Edvard, and has published two dozen children’s books, which have been listed among the Ten Best of the Year by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and The New Yorker, and among the best Dozen of the Decade by Amazon.com.

Michelson was born in East New York, Brooklyn. He served two terms as poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, where he hosts Northampton Poetry Radio and owns R. Michelson Galleries.