Michael McKimm was born in Belfast and grew up near the Giant’s Causeway. A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, he won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and was an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa in 2010. He now lives in London where he works for the Geological Society Library.
Michael has published the poetry collections Still This Need (Heaventree Press, 2009), Fossil Sunshine (Worple Press, 2013) and Because we could not dance at the wedding (Worple Press, 2023) and edited the anthologies MAP: Poems After William Smith’s Geological Map of 1815 (Worple Press, 2015) and The Tree Line: Poems for Trees, Woods & People (Worple Press, 2017). His work has appeared in anthologies including Best of Irish Poetry 2010 (Southword Editions, 2009), Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt, 2012), Dear World & Everyone In It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe, 2013), The Future Always Makes Me So Thirsty: New Poets from the North of Ireland (Blackstaff Press, 2016), Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (Lifeboat Press, 2021) and Windfall: Irish Nature Poems to Inspire and Connect (Hachette, 2023).
Research for Fossil Sunshine was funded by Arts Council England Grants for the Arts and was a collaboration with Earth scientists to create a new series of poems addressing the geology of climate change. Find out more at www.writtenintherocks.wordpress.com