Poet Mike Chasar earned a BA in English from Valparaiso University, an MA in English (creative writing) from Miami University in Ohio, and a PhD in English and a certificate in book studies from the University of Iowa. His collections of poetry include the fine-art letterpress chapbooks The Dialpainter Sonnets (2004) and Seeing Things (2005). He has published poems in The Formalist, Poetry, Puerto del Sol, and Southern Poetry Review, and his op-ed verse appears frequently in newspapers.
 
Chasar is the author of the book Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America (2012). He has had numerous articles and reviews published in such journals as the American Book Review, the Iowa Review Web, the Writer’s Chronicle, Poets & Writers magazine, and U.S. Popular Print Culture 1860–1920, volume 7 of The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture series. He writes about poetry and popular culture on his blog Poetry & Popular Culture, and a version of Everyday Reading placed first in an international dissertation competition sponsored by the Council of Graduate Schools and University Microfilms International. With Heidi Bean, he co-edited the volume Poetry after Cultural Studies (2011), a collection of essays examining the intersections of poetry and poetics with culture.
 
Chasar received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship and is an assistant professor at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.