Michele Wolf

Poet, teacher and editor Michele Wolf (michelewolf.com) was raised in Miami and now lives in Maryland near Washington D.C. She earned degrees from Boston University and Columbia, and began to write poetry seriously after winning a scholarship in nonfiction to attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. There, she says, she had a "transformative experience. It was the first time I was exposed to contemporary poetry, saw it valued, heard poems read aloud by their authors. I was deeply moved and knew this was the kind of writing I wanted to create."

Wolf is the author of two books of poetry: "Immersion," selected by Denise Duhamel for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection, and "Conversations During Sleep," which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her chapbook, "The Keeper of Light," was the winner of the Painted Bride Quarterly Poetry Chapbook Series award. Concerned with family and adoption issues, world events and history, Wolf's narrative poems are at once taut and musical. Yusef Komunyakaa described "Immersion" as a "paced meditation...active silences breathing underneath, holding the shaped telling together." Wolf has received an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award and fellowships from the Edward F. Albee Foundation and Yaddo. She has served on the administrative staff of Bread Loaf, where she was a National Arts Club Scholar in Poetry, and has taught at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, since 2002. --adapted from the Poetry Foundation