M. Bartley Seigel

poet laureate icon
Poet Laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, 2021–2022

M. Bartley Seigel received a BA in journalism from Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and an MFA from Pennsylvania State University, University Park. He is the author of This Is What They Say (Typecast Publishing, 2013), founding editor-in-chief of the new poetry letterpress, Simple Machines Magazine, and founding editor emeritus of PANK Magazine, which he coedited with Roxane Gay from 2006 to 2015.

Seigal is an associate professor of creative writing and the director of the writing center in the department of humanities at Michigan Technological University. He is the 2021–22 poet laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In 2021, he received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.

Seigal lives in the Keweenaw Peninsula, in Michigan’s western Upper Peninsula, in Ojibwe homelands and Treaty of 1842 territory, on the shores of Lake Superior.