Michael Dumanis
The acclaimed poetry of Michael Dumanis weaves together memories of childhood, diaspora, and dislocation.
Biography
Dumanis is the author of the poetry collection My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and coeditor (with poet Cate Marvin) of the younger poets’ anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006). His poems have appeared in journals such as American Letters and Commentary, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Verse. His writing has been recognized with residencies at Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, Italy; a 2012 Creative Workforce Fellowship from the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture; fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the James Michener Foundation, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Wesleyan Writers’ Conference; and a grant from the Ohio Arts Council.
Born in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union, Dumanis emigrated with his family at the age of five and grew up in Western New York. Dumanis has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Houston, and Nebraska Wesleyan University, and since 2007, has been a professor of English at Cleveland State University, where he also served as director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, a literary press, and taught in the consortial Northeast Ohio MFA Program. He holds a BA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Dumanis joined the Bennington faculty in Fall 2012.
