Michele Wolf

Poet, teacher, and editor Michele Wolf was raised in Miami, but has spent much of her life in New York City or just outside Washington D.C., in Maryland. She earned degrees from Boston University and Columbia University, and began to write poetry seriously after winning a scholarship in non-fiction to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. There, Wolf 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 (2011), selected by Denise Duhamel for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection, and Conversations During Sleep (1998), which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her chapbook, The Keeper of Light (1995), won the Painted Bride Quarterly Poetry Chapbook Series. 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.