Michael W. Shurgot

I was born in Buffalo, New York in 1943 and claim ancestors from four European nationalities: Polish and Ukrainian (my father) and German and Irish (my mother). I attended Canisius High School and Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, majoring in English, and then earned my MA in English from the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis in 1968 and my PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1977. I subsequently taught at University of Texas-El Paso, Seattle University, and I retired as Professor of Humanities from South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia, WA in 2006.

I have published seven books: a memoir, three Western novels, and three scholarly books on Shakespeare. My memoir, "Could You Be Startin' from Somewhere Else? Sketches from Buffalo and Beyond," chronicles a myriad of humorous, perplexing, and sometimes sad family experiences in a lower middle-class neighborhood of immigrant families in post WW II Buffalo. It is a search for the present in the past, and for the meaning of that elusive word "home." My novels constitute the Green River Trilogy which narrate the adventures of several Caucasian and Native American characters as they wrestle with their respective deities amid the violence of the Western Plains from the mid 1860s to the late 1880s. My Shakespeare books focus on the performance of Shakespeare's plays in Renaissance London, on the complexity of his major characters, and on the actors who have performed those roles.

My wife Gail and I have lived in Seattle since 1982. We have two children, Mara and Nicholas; and three grandchildren, Max, Bennett, and Wilson Shurgot.