Michael Bourgo

Michael Bourgo started out to be a history teacher but ended up spending 34 years at IBM in sales and customer service. He began writing as a casual hobby some thirty years ago, but since retirement it has become a vocation that he pursues on a daily basis.

He divides his poetry into two broad categories: spontaneous and planned. "Spontaneous" poems are the ones that you will find in his first two collections, “Moments Past and Present” and “More Moments.” These are mostly traditional lyric poems, centered on daily life, family, nature, and beliefs, arising from the thoughts and observations of every day.

His "planned" verse appears in two recent books. “Towards a More Perfect Union” is a set of 51 rhymed poems in a set format that profile each of the states and the District of Columbia. “The Grand Tour” describes each of the 50 capital cities of Europe in similar fashion. Although Michael has no plans to give up serious reflective poetry, he enjoyed the very different challenges of writing light verse in rhyme and sticking to a fixed format. Next on the horizon is "This Poem, That Poem," a collection of 64 short poems in the minute form covering a wide range of subjects and moods.

His other volume of verse, "The Years," is a set of 24 long poems on notable characters and events in the 19th century. It's a marriage of two lifelong interests-- poetry and history. In the works is "Modern Times," which carries the historical account forward into the 20th century.

“Once Upon a Time” is his first venture in prose. It is a memoir of his life from age 3 to 14, and one which began as a series of memory poems he wrote some years ago.

Michael is an active member of the writing community in State College PA. He has received several commissions from the Penn State Center for the Book, leads two local writing groups and teaches for the Penn State extension program. He has won first place in the Grand Prize contest of the Pennsylvania state poetry three times and finished first twice in the Iowa Poetry Association annual contest. His verse has appeared in a number of publications. You can see samples of his work at http://theseasonsandotherpoems.blogspot.com.