Biography

Michael Boughn is a writer and teacher whose published works include poetry, literary essays, short stories, and young adult non-fiction. He taught part-time at the University of Toronto for 23 years, covering courses in post-modern fiction, poetry, children’s literature, American literature, detective fiction and science fiction, among others.

Born in Riverside, California (home of the Parent Navel Orange Tree and North American Easter Sunrise Services) in 1946, he was a third-generation Californian. He left in 1966 because of his opposition to the illegal and immoral war being waged against Viet Nam. Landing in Vancouver, he enrolled at Simon Fraser University—after planting trees in the bush for a year—where he studied with Robin Blaser who introduced him to the work of William Blake, Ezra Pound, H.D. William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn and others. It was the defining moment of his life.

From 1970 to 1979, Boughn worked on the lakefront in Toronto loading and unloading boxcars and trailers at Smith Transport, while organizing against the Viet Nam war and supporting anti-racist politics within the south Asian community in Toronto. In 1979, after the U.S. dropped all charges against him, he returned to California where he ran a high speed press in a metal stamping factory in Silicon Valley while finishing his BA at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He continued to develop his poetry during these years, though he never published.

In 1980, he moved to Buffalo, N.Y. where he joined the graduate program at SUNY Buffalo. From 1982-1986 he worked as Robert Creeley’s graduate assistant and a cataloger in the Poetry/Rare Books Collection. His dissertation was a descriptive bibliography of H.D., published in 1993 by the University of Virginia. Graduating with a PhD. in 1986, he remained in Buffalo, working with another of his teachers, the poet John Clarke, to produce the magazine intent: a newsletter of talk, thinking and document. At this time he started a micro press, shuffaloff, which over the years has irregularly published work by Robert Creeley, John Clarke, Robin Blaser, and a number of younger poets including Elizabeth Willis, Jorge Guitart, and Lisa Jarnot. Together with Eternal Network, shuffaloff has also published a number of ephemeral "Joints" by Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Victor Coleman,  Oliver Cusimano, Emily Izsak, and others. Along with Victor Coleman, he edited Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book for the University of California Press. In 2024, Station Hill Press published a collection of essays, Measure's Measures: Poetry and Knowledge.

From April 2016 to May 2020, he and Kent Johnson edited the online poetry journal, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars.

Currently, one of the great joys in his life is herding sheep with Case, his Border Collie partner.