Michael Palmer was born in New York City in 1943. While at Harvard College he edited Joglars magazine with Clark Coolidge. He took his graduate degree in Comparative Literature at Harvard and in 1969, moved to San Francisco, where he still resides. He is the author of the poetry collections Little Elegies for Sister Satan (2021),  The Laughter of the Sphinx (2016), Thread (2011), Company of Moths (2005), Codes Appearing: Poems 1979–1988 (2001), The Promises of Glass (2000), The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972–1995 (1998), At Passages (1995), and Blake’s Newton (1974), among others. Palmer’s awards include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. From 1999 to 2004, he served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.