Michael Kleber-Diggs

Michael Kleber-Diggs is the author of Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), which won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize, the 2021 Poetry Center Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. His essay, “On the Complex Flavors of Black Joy,” is included in the anthology There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman (Penguin Random House 2021). Another essay, “There Was a Tremendous Softness,” appears in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions, 2023). His poems and essays often explore themes of intimacy, community, empathy, and grace, practices he believes are distinct and interdependent. Among other places, Michael’s writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, Poem-A-Day, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sierra Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Post Road Magazine, Great River Review, Water~Stone Review, The Under Review, and several other journals and anthologies. He has taught poetry and creative writing at the university level and through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop for more than ten years.