Erika Michael was born in Vienna, Austria, emmigrating to New York with her parents in November, 1939, to escape Nazi persecution. She attended The High School of Music and Art in New York where she grew up and afterwards pursued degrees in the visual arts, receiving her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Washington. She has taught at Trinity University, San Antonio, Oregon State in Corvallis, and the University of Puget Sound. Michael has participated in extensive poetry workshops with Carolyn Forché, the late Thomas Lux, Linda Gregerson, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Tim Siebles, Major Jackson, and Jeffrey Levine. Her work has appeared in Poetica Magazine, Cascade, Drash: Northwest Mosaic, Mizmor l’David Anthology, Bracken Magazine, The Winter Anthology, The Institute for Advanced Study Letter, Belletrist Magazine, The Dewdrop, Aletheia Literary Quarterly, and elsewhere. In 2019 she was awarded first prize in the Ekphrastic Poetry Competition at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She reads her work at various venues around the Pacific Northwest and enjoys accompanying a local band on the djembe.
PRAISE:
In Erika Michael’s impressive book Refugee, she does more than memorialize her family’s persecution in Austria for their Jewish faith. While Refugee shows the tremendous loss, brutality, and injustice of it all—the poems also bear witness to moments of resilience and joy. While the book itself raises questions of memories and their allusiveness, what is never in question is the truth of feeling surrounding those memories. Refugee blends oral history, songs, and family archival detail to such a degree that readers will feel transported to the locale of each poem. The result is a tremendous accomplishment of faith, memory, and lyricism.
—Charlotte Pence, Mobile Poet Laureate and author of Code
Erika Michael’s Refugee ushers us into a Jewish early childhood in Vienna as the Third Reich rises and takes hold. Her poems then carry us west to new beginnings that millions would never access. We’re drawn, by her pulsing music of necessity, on through a life imbued with gratitude and a keen feeling of the miraculous. The senses are alive in these poems of moments that might easily have never been. Refugee bristles with the utter unlikelihood of a family’s American life. Erika Michael, “shabby kid with memories of flight,” renders a destroyed world breathing, laughing, murmuring prayers passed down centuries…reminding us love survives the forces of annihilation.
–Jed Myers, author of Learning to Hold and The Marriage of Space and Time
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