Michael Hettich was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New York City and its suburbs. He has lived in upstate New York, Colorado, Northern Florida, Vermont, Miami, and Black Mountain, North Carolina, where he now lives with his wife, Colleen. He has published over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, and his work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. Hettich’s awards include several Florida Individual Artists Fellowships, a Florida Book Award, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, and the David Martinson–Meadow Hawk Prize. He often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and fellow writers. The poems in Hettich’s latest collection, To Start an Orchard (Press 53), bring a keener awareness to the fraught and fragile natural world that is ours to inhabit, nourish, and preserve.
