Born and raised in Riverside, California Michael Boughn moved to Canada in 1966 to escape the U.S. military draft. He lived in Vancouver where he studied at Simon Fraser University with Robin Blaser who introduced him to the work of William Blake, Charles Olson, H.D., Jack Spicer, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and other writers crucial to continuing poetry practice.

In 1971 Michael left university in order to organize full time. Over the next several years he worked in various jobs, eventually becoming a Teamster in Toronto where he was a freight handler on the lakefront for 8 years. In 1978 he returned to California where he worked in a metal stamping factory in Silicon Valley while finishing his BA at UC Santa Cruz. From 1982-89 he pursued graduate studies at SUNY Buffalo where he studied with John Clarke and Robert Creeley and completed his PhD, producing the first descriptive bibliography of the poet, H.D.

Michael's first book of poems, Iterations of the Diagonal, was published in 1995, followed by A little post-apocalyptic suite for RC with thanks for the rhino (1996), Dislocation Flutter (1998), One’s own MIND (1999), and from Coach House Books in 2003, Dislocations in Crystal, which Michael read at Influency in the fall of 2008. In 2009, BookThug published his 22 Skidoo, SubTractions.

Together with Victor Coleman, he edited Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book forthcoming from the University of California Press in the fall of 2010. He is currently at work on a new book called Great Canadian Poems for the Aged Volume 1 Illustrated Edition.

Michael currently lives in Toronto with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two children, Amelia and Sam, where he spends a lot of time in hockey arenas.