Michael White was born in 1956. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri and the University of Utah (Ph.D. 1990). Michael has published 3 full-length collections of poetry: The Island (1993), Palma Cathedral (1998), and Re-entry (2006); His poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The New Republic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Poetry. Michael has won the American Poets Prize three times in Utah, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and is a recipient of fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he lives.

Re-Entry

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry.. Michael White's poetry is unusual for its loving patience in imagining how human predicaments feel. Using a striking variety of measures, his meditations attempt to re-enact the grain of consciousness as it plays out, from elegy to simple joy.

Palma Cathedral

From White’s minutely observed and lyrically rendered landscapes — where vine-snarl defines the upper world and algal afterglow the lower — to his reenvisioning of the Death of Turnus from the Aeneid, Palma Cathedral traces the journey of the imagination in the face of overwhelming loss.

The Island

While he was Poet Laureate of the United States (1990-91), Mark Strand selected this book for publication with special funds administered by the National Endowment for the Arts, saying, "No first book in recent memory has so much wisdom, so much lyric conviction as Michael White's The Island. I find his poems astonishingly mature, profound, evocative". White's poems rise from the dark interstices of memory and imagination, his brief love poems of uncannily bright phrasing providing counterpoint to his mastery of elegiac meditation. He knows the water-world of rivers and bays and boats so intuitively that his rhythms of language and image often convey a parallel sense of time and motion, his eye for luminous detail elevating an already impressive gift for narrative. White's imaginative world is like no other in contemporary poetry. He evokes Emersonian themes as comfortably as he explores a range of verse forms, his landscapes gravitating toward an art of fleeting illusory grace.