Michael Gizzi was born in Schenectady, New York. He received his BA and MFA from Brown University, then spent the next decade as a licensed arborist in Southern New England. In the early 1980s he migrated to the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts, where he began teaching. For the next twenty years he coordinated many poetry readings and edited lingo magazine and Hard Press (which published, among others, Bernadette Mayer, Merrill Gilfillan, Jim Brodey, and the artist Trevor Winkfield). Back in Rhode Island, Gizzi taught at Brown University where he also coordinated the Downcity Poetry Series and continued publishing, with Craig Watson in Jamestown, RI, the imprint Qua Books. He is currently teaching at Roger Williams University in Bristol and lives in Providence.
