Michael Sandler is a Seattle-area poet whose work confronts a range of historical, spiritual and contemporary human concerns. For much of his adulthood Michael wrote poems for the desk drawer, and only began to publish in 2009. Since then, his poems have appeared in scores of journals, including recently in Literary Imagination, THINK, and Smartish Pace. His first book of poems, The Lamps of History, was published by FutureCycle Press in January 2021.

Michael’s education as a writer has been atypical. His undergraduate degree was from Stanford, in History, where he took one creative writing course (the instructor said his stories were like prose poems). While pursuing a law degree from Yale, he was allowed into Cleanth Brooks’s graduate modern poetry seminar and became an admirer of Frost and Stevens. As he has said, “Perhaps because of Brooks’s influence, New Criticism’s interplay of text and form still influences how I approach poems.” More recently, he has participated in writers’ workshops at Richard Hugo House in Seattle and at the University of Washington.

Apart from his work as a poet, Michael has had a full legal career—in private law firms as an attorney, at the U.S. Department of State, as an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown and University of Washington schools of law, and as an arbitrator. It has been a Janus-faced, Poetry/Law working life.