M. Bartley Seigel

M. Bartley Seigel is the author of In the Bone-Cracking Cold (Wayne State University Press, 2025) and This Is What They Say (Typecast Publishing, 2013). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, About Place, The Fourth River, and many other journals. He served as Poet Laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula from 2021 to 2022, and was an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. His work often turns on the Upper Peninsula’s landscapes and histories—its lakes, forests, and long winters—with an eye toward land, water, memory, and the people, plants, and animals who call it home.

For over a decade, Seigel worked as an editor and small-press publisher, founding and running PANK Magazine alongside collaborator Roxane Gay from 2006 to 2016, Simple Machines Magazine from 2020 to 2023, and serving as reviews editor for Words without Borders. That editorial life ran alongside his career as a teacher: he is Professor of Humanities, Affiliate Professor of Visual & Performing Arts, and Writing Center Director at Michigan Technological University, where he has taught writing and literature since 2005. He also spent a year as a visiting professor at Tartu University in Estonia.

Seigel holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pennsylvania State University and a BA in Journalism from Eastern Michigan University. He lives in Houghton, Michigan, with his wife, Dr. Marika Seigel.