Born in Portland, Oregon, poet Michael Dickman grew up with his mother and twin brother, poet Matthew Dickman, in Lents, a suburb of Portland. He earned a BA at the University of Oregon and an MFA at the University of Texas-Austin’s Michener Center for Writers.
 
Dickman’s elegiac free verse poems explore the difficult, often violent spectacle of personal memory; voice, in Dickman’s work, is a character unto itself, at once hopeful and spare, speculative and warped. As Rebecca Mead noted in her 2009 New Yorker profile of the Dickman twins, “Michael’s poems are interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines; they seethe with incipient violence.”
 
Dickman’s poetry collections include The End of the West (2009) and Flies (2011), which won the Academy of American Poets’s James Laughlin Award. A former Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, Dickman won the 2008 Narrative Prize and has received residencies and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. He lives in Portland, Oregon.