Biography

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Michael Laskey is a full time freelance poet, editor, and tutor with many years experience of promoting contemporary poetry.

 

He has published five collections, most recently Weighing the Present (Smith/Doorstop, 2014) and The Man Alone: New & Selected Poems (2008). His first two collections were Poetry Book Society Recommendations: Thinking of Happiness (Peterloo, 1991) and The Tightrope Wedding (Smith/Doorstop, 1999), which was also shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize.

 

He co-founded the international Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in 1989 and directed it through its first decade. He also founded and co-edited the poetry magazine Smiths Knoll with Roy Blackman (1991-2002) and Joanna Cutts (2002-2012) until the final fiftieth issue in November 2012. He published pamphlets under the Smiths Knoll imprint until 2016, many available here and still continues his work as an editor with The Garlic Press (which he established 2003) which principally publishes Suffolk based poets.

 

A long-term poetry activist, he was a founding member of the East Suffolk Poetry Workshop group which has been meeting monthly for thirty years. A regular tutor for the Arvon Foundation, he currently leads Cut Loose Saturday morning writing sessions – with Dean Parkin –originally at the arts centre in Halesworth, which have now migrated online sessions on Zoom.

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Visit Michael's page at the Poetry Archive website.