Michael Burkard

Michael Burkard is the author of more than ten collections of poetry, most recently Envelope of Night (Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1966-1990), published by Nightboat Books in 2008.  In addition, hundreds of his poems have been published in such prominent little magazines as the American Poetry Review, which gave him the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Award in 1984, 1985, and 1999, and Ploughshares, which honored him with its Denise and Mel Cohen Award in 1986.  He received the Whiting Writers’ Award from the Whiting Foundation in 1988, and his poems have been included in four of the Best American Poetry anthologies (2000, 2001, 2004, and 2005) and he won a Pushcart Prize, in 1988.

Mr. Burkard received his B.A. from Hobart College in 1968, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1973; the following year he was Editor of the Iowa Review. An associate professor of English in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University since 1997, Mr. Burkard previously taught at Kirkland College (1975-78) and Sarah Lawrence College (1983-84, 1986-87). He has held Fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (1978-79) and the MacDowell Colony (1982), and has been a visiting writer at New York University (1991) and the University of Louisville (1992, 1996), as well as a writer-in-residence at Austin Peay State University (1990). For six years, from 1991 to 1997, he was also a creative arts therapist and credentialed alcoholism counselor at Amythst Chemical Dependency Services.

As Mr. Burkard explained in an interview on the Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA) website, "In the two and a half years between my undergraduate and graduate work I was a psychiatric aide at McLean Hospital. And in the late 1970s I was a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown. These two experiences were at least as formative as my ‘degree’ days. Meeting with artists at FAWC was terribly helpful and important for me. I have an avid interest in drawing, and have been drawing since 1982, thanks to the suggestion of a dear-artist-friend, Mary Hackett. And I have been writing songs in various ways since I was ten years old. I am as much influenced by art and music as I am literature, and as much by fiction writing as poetry." He was writer-in-residence at ACA in 2007.