Michael N. McGregor

Born in Seattle, Washington, Michael N. McGregor earned a BA from the University of Oregon and an MFA from Columbia University. An essayist, a biographer, a historian, and a fiction writer, he authored a biography of the poet Robert Lax titled Pure Act (Fordham University Press, 2015), which was a finalist for a Washington State Book Award and recipient of an Excellence in Writing Award from the Association of Catholic Publishers. McGregor’s writings have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Poetry magazine, Tin House, Orion, StoryQuarterly, South Dakota Review, Seattle Review, Poets & Writers, TheWriter’s Chronicle, and Oregon Historical Quarterly.

McGregor taught fiction and nonfiction writing for more than 20 years at Columbia University, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and Portland State University, where he was a founder and an early director of the MFA program. In the fall of 2018, he was one of eight writers from seven countries in residence at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China. In 2022, he was named the Oregon Historical Society’s Donald J. Sterling Senior Research Fellow.