My Terza Rima

Poetry. Michael Gizzi received his BA and MFA from Brown University where he studied with Keith Waldrop. In 1982 he moved to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. He has collaborated with Clark Collidge, Celia Coolidge, John Yau, and Bernadette Mayer who says of his work, Troubadour-trickster Gizzi is a poetry trouble maker and he's fortunate to have two golden z's in his name. Interlocking Gizzi is relentlessly learned about the American idiom and it's delphic and unobscurely elfin to perceive everything the way we think he does--Bernadette Mayer.

Michael Gizzi was born in Schenectady, New York. He received his BA and MFA from Brown University, then spent the next decade as a licensed arborist in Southern New England. In the early 1980s he migrated to the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts, where he began teaching. For the next twenty years he coordinated many poetry readings and edited lingo magazine and Hard Press (which published, among others, Bernadette Mayer, Merrill Gilfillan, Jim Brodey, and the artist Trevor Winkfield). Back in Rhode Island, Gizzi taught at Brown University where he also coordinated the Downcity Poetry Series and continued publishing, with Craig Watson in Jamestown, RI, the imprint Qua Books. He is currently teaching at Roger Williams University in Bristol and lives in Providence.