AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: Michael Spence was born in St. Petersburg, Florida, and moved around the country several times as a child and young adult, since his father worked for Boeing. After graduating from the University of Washington in 1974 with a B.A. in English (Creative Writing), he joined the U. S. Navy. He served four years as a junior officer aboard the aircraft carrier, USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67). On completion of his hitch, he returned to Seattle and has been driving public-transit buses in the region for over twenty years.

His work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Antioch Review, The Georgia Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, Yankee, and others. New poems are forthcoming in The New Criterion, Barrow Street, Literary Imagination, The North American Review, the Seattle Review, and Southwest Review.  His books are The Spine (Purdue University Press, 1987) and Adam Chooses (Rose Alley Press, 1998). In 1990, his work was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.