Michael Daley

Michael Daley was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1947, and attended public schools there until entering a junior seminary at 14 to study for the Catholic priesthood and become a member of the Salesian Order, an experience which has informed much of his writing. Seven years later, he left the religious order, worked as a copy-boy for the Boston Herald-Traveler, as a taxi driver, and later as an assistant in the first Special Education program in the country. He received his Bachelor's degree...See more

Michael Daley was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1947, and attended public schools there until entering a junior seminary at 14 to study for the Catholic priesthood and become a member of the Salesian Order, an experience which has informed much of his writing. Seven years later, he left the religious order, worked as a copy-boy for the Boston Herald-Traveler, as a taxi driver, and later as an assistant in the first Special Education program in the country. He received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts in downtown Boston while on his tenth hitchhiking trip across the United States. In 1972 he settled in Port Townsend, Washington, where he worked for Olypmic Reforestation, a tree-planting collective. In 1976, he co-founded Empty Bowl press and published several issues of Dalmo'ma and the Dalmo'ma series, as well as numerous collections of poetry from Pacific Northwest writers. Empty Bowl published his book, The Straits, in 1983. From 1983 to 1988 he worked for both the Washington State Arts Commission's Poets-In-the-Schools program and Massachusetts' Artist Collaborative. From 1984 to 2005, he published six chapbooks of poetry, as well as numerous poems and essays in national and local periodicals, anthologies, and on various web- & blog sites. In 1990 he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. In 2007 Pleasure boat Studio published Way Out There: Lyrical Essays. He has been an English teacher at Mount Vernon High School in Mount Vernon, Washington, since 1990. He lives at Lake McMurray with his wife, Kathy and sixteen year old son, Theo. See less