James L. McMichael

James L. McMichael (born 1939) is an American poet.

The Pasadena, California native received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. In 1970, following the breakup of his first marriage, he married his second wife, Phylinda Wallace, a translator. He has three children, Robert, Geoffrey and Owen.

McMichael is a professor of English and director of the Master of Fine Arts Poetry Writing Program at the University of California, Irvine.

"McMichael writes densely; his language is compacted, coiled, sprung (in Hopkins's sense) and highly allusive. It is never simple or straightforward," writes Liz Rozenberg in a Boston Globe review.

Eric McHenry, in a brief review of Capacity in The New York Times, wrote: "Since 1980, his [McMichael's] sole contributions to the genre (excluding a "new and selected") have been three book-length poems, each strikingly different from the others and from anything else on the market. In Capacity, he has exchanged the long lines and explicit autobiography of the previous two for dispassion, elision and lines as short as a syllable."

His first new poetry collection in a decade, Capacity, was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award for Poetry.

He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a 1995 Whiting Award, the 1999 Arthur Rense Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Academy of American Poets' Fellowship.

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