Michael Friedman

I was born in New York in 1960 and grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the son of a Freudian psychoanalyst and a visual artist. In high school at the Collegiate School, my classmates included JFK, Jr. and David Duchovny. As a sophmore at Columbia in 1979, taking a year-long creative writing seminar with Kenneth Koch, the great New York School poet, was a life-altering event. At Columbia, I received a creative writing fellowship and a couple of poetry prizes. In graduate school at Yale (MA, English lit.), studying Romantic poetry with Harold Bloom was a highlight. While getting my law degree at Duke, I had the good fortune to take seminars with two other leading lights of literary theory, Fredric Jameson and Stanley Fish.

I live in Denver with my wife, Dianne, and our sons, Henry (age 12) and Joe (age 10). On typical Saturdays during the winter and spring I can be found skiing with them at Eldora, a small, old-timey ski area in the mountains outside of Boulder. I am a partner in the Denver office of a national law firm.