The American poet, author and professor Peter Michelson was born December 23, 1935, raised in a suburb of Seattle by a single mother. He attended Whitman College and received his B.A. in English in 1958. He received an M.A. in literature from the University of Wyoming in 1959, and was “all but dissertation” for a doctorate in history of literary criticism from the University of Chicago. He taught at several colleges and universities, including as an instructor at Jamestown College in North Dakota from 1959-1960; at Northwestern University from 1962-1965 as an instructor and 1971-1974 as an assistant professor; at the University of Notre Dame from 1965-1969 as an instructor and assistant professor, where he also hosted a national conference on pornography in 1969; and the University of Colorado, Boulder, from 1974 to present, as an associate professor, professor, and now professor emeritus after his 2006 retirement. He has also taught at Tianjin Foreign Language Institute in China, where he was a visiting professor in 1982; at Eastern University in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, where he was a curriculum consultant in 1992; and at Abo Akademi and Turku Yliopisto in Finland on a Fulbright Lectureship in 2001 and 2002.

Michelson published The Aesthetics of Pornography in 1971, and The Eater, his first collection of poems, in 1972. He published two more books of poetry in the late 1970s and 1980s; Pacific Plainsong first appeared in 1978, and then in an expanded second edition in 1987, and When the Revolution Really in 1984. His second book of criticism, Speaking the Unspeakable: A Poetics of Obscenity, published in 1992. Throughout the last six decades his essays, poems, and articles have been published in numerous anthologies and publications, including The American Book Review, The Chicago Review, The Nation, New Republic, and Rolling Stock, among others.