Richard Michelson

RICHARD MICHELSON’s poetry collections include Sleeping as Fast as I Can (Slant Books), More Money than God (Pitt Poetry Series), a finalist for the Paterson Prize, Battles and Lullabies (U of Illinois), Tap Dancing for the Relatives (U of Central Florida), and two fine press limited edition collaborations, Masks and Semblant, with the artist, Leonard Baskin (Gehenna Press). Michelson wrote the libretto for the off-Broadway music-theater piece, Dear Edvard, and his many children’s books have been named among the Ten Best Books 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 has received a National Jewish Book Award, two Sydney Taylor Gold Medals –and two silver–from the Association of Jewish Libraries, two Junior Library Guild Gold Medals, and an International Reading Association Teacher’s Choice Award. He has twice been a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. Michelson received a 2016 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and his work was chosen to represent the Commonwealth at the 2018 Library of Congress National Book Festival. In 2019 Michelson became the sixth recipient of the Samuel Minot Jones Award for Literary Achievement, and he received a second Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in 2023.

Michelson’s poetry has been included in many anthologies, including The Norton Introduction to Poetry, Unsettling America: Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and What saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump. He has published poems widely, including The Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, The Harvard Review, Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, The Common, Nimrod, Solstice, Vox Populi, Tikkun, Moment, and numerous other journals.

A native of East New York, Brooklyn, Michelson served two terms as Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, where he hosts a Northampton Poetry Radio and owns R. Michelson Galleries.