My hope here is to meld cultural and political commentary while analyzing current events through the lens of history. That is, how can the past better shape our understanding of the present. From time to time I will stray from this purpose more or less as is necessary, but I am a firm believer that to make the present legible, and to make the future malleable, the past must be used as both a lens and a lathe.
Bio
Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer and educator. Author of The Only Worlds We Know (Button Poetry, 2019), he has received grants and scholarships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the LOFT Literary Center, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Winner of the Scotti Merrill Award for poetry from the Key West Literary Seminar, Michael’s poetry has appeared in The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, Copper Nickel, and Best New Poets 2018 among others. Holding an Ed.M. from Harvard University and an MFA from Cornell University, Michael’s research focuses on the intersections of colonialism, race formation and industrialized forms of violence across the Long 19th Century. Michael is currently working on his second book, a hybrid work which attends to history through the lyric and maps a constellation of material and cultural forms of violence across the Atlantic world culminating in the killing fields of The First World War.
