RICHARD MICHELSON’s first chapbook, The Head of the Family, was published in 1978. A full-length collection, Tap Dancing for the Relatives, followed in 1985. Masks, a fine-art, limited edition of Michelson’s poetry and Leonard Baskin’s etchings, was the final book published by Baskin’s Gehenna Press before the artist’s death in June 2000. In January 2006, The University of Illinois Press published Michelson’s long awaited new collection, Battles & Lullabies.

    Michelson's poetry has also appeared in many major anthologies, among them The Norton Introduction to Poetry (Norton), Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Northwestern University Press), Men of Our Time: Male Poetry in Contemporary America (University of Georgia), Unsettling America: Contemporary American Multicultural Poetry (Viking), and Ghosts of the Holocaust (Texas Tech University Press).

    Michelson has received the Felix Pollak Prize for Poetry, a New Letters Literary Award, an Eve of St. Agnes Award, and an SCAA International Poetry Award.