About Michael Gottlieb

Michael Gottlieb is a poet and the author of twenty-three books of poetry, essays and memoir. His latest book is Collected Memoirs, published by Chax Press in November, 2023, as the third volume in a uniform edition, joining Collected Essays (March 2023) and Selected Poems (2021).

His next book, For My Next Trick: New Poems will also be published by Chax, in 2025-26, in the matching uniform edition format.

Other recent titles include Mostly Clearing (2019), What We Do: Essays for Poets (2016), I Had Every Intention (2014), Dear All (2013), Letters to A Middle-Aged Poet (2012), The Dust (2011), Memoir And Essay (2010). A first-generation member of the Language Poetry school, he helped edit Roof, one of its foundational magazines, and for several decades its successor press, Roof Books. He was also the publisher of Case/Casement Books (1981-1999). He started the Last Tuesday multi-media performance series at La MaMa in NYC in the 1980s and founded and co-curates the OtherWords (formerly Familiar Trees) poetry reading series in Great Barrington, MA.

A number of his works have been adopted for the stage, notably at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in New York City. In November 2023 the Poetry Project served for the third time as the producer for a dramatization of his work, presenting in the church’s Sanctuary, I AM ANGRY AT A FORCE I CANNOT SEE: BASED ON THE POETRY OF MICHAEL GOTTLIEB, a staged adaptation of ‘The Voices’ his long poem about Covid and NYC, and ‘The Dust,’ his long poem about 9/11, directed by Chana Porter, with the generous support of the Axe-Houghton Foundation. The performances coincided with the publication of his Collected Memoirs.

In November 2019, coinciding with the publication of Mostly Clearing, the Poetry Project produced the play IS THIS CLEAR ENOUGH? created and directed by Genée Coreno, based on Mostly Clearing. In September 2011, the director Fiona Templeton staged THE DUST, her dramatization of his 9/11 poem, at St. Mark’s to mark the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Ron Silliman called ‘The Dust,’ when it first appeared in print in 2003, “the first great poetic work to emerge from the trauma of September 11.” Eileen Myles has written that the body of Gottlieb’s work focuses "much like the narrator does in Robert Musil’s epic the 'Man Without Qualities,’ on the difficult moment in which one faces one’s culture and understands… what it is to be a man." His first-published memoir, Memoir and Essay, was described by the poet Elizabeth Fodaski as “doing for New York in the 70s what A Movable Feast did for Paris in the 20s.”

Gottlieb was born in the Bronx and grew up in Westchester County, NY. He graduated from Bennington College where he studied poetry and painting. He’s worked for a private detective agency and in business affairs for Warner Bros. Inc. He founded a start-up and most recently served as Vice President, Digital Insight & Chief Research Expert for the global software company SAP. He divides his time between New York City and Connecticut.