Michael Sowder

Described by David Bottoms as “one of our finest spiritual poets,” Michael Sowder’s poetry explores themes of wilderness, fatherhood, and spirituality. His strongest influences have been the world’s spiritual poets: Whitman, Kabir, Rumi, Hafiz, Du Fu, Li Po, and Rilke, as well as the work of contemporary poets, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, David Bottoms, Pattianne Rogers, James Wright, and Li-Young-Lee.

Sowder’s first collection, The Empty Boat, was chosen by Diane Wakoski to win the 2004 T.S. Eliot Award. In response to the collection, Wakoski noted the way Sowder “takes the crow myth of Ted Hughes and the wish for Electra's retribution in Plath, creating his own personal mythology out of American reclamation and spiritual revelation.” A Calendar of Crows, Sowder’s first chapbook, won the inaugural Diagram/New Michigan Press Award. His scholarly study of Walt Whitman’s poetry, Whitman’s Ecstatic Union, was published by Routledge in 2005. In his most recent collection, House Under the Moon, Sowder relies on his longtime practice in yogic and Buddhist traditions to investigate the challenges of living a contemplative life in the contemporary world.

Sowder’s poems and essays appear in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, Five Points, Green Mountains Review, Poet Lore, Sufi Journal, New Poets of the American West, the New York Times Online, Shambhala Sun, and elsewhere.

Born in 1956 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sowder moved with his family to Birmingham, Alabama, when he was nine. He graduated from the University of Alabama in Birmingham and studied law at the University of Washington in Seattle. After clerking for a federal judge, he worked as a lawyer for several years in Atlanta.

While a lawyer in Atlanta, he obtained his MFA in poetry at Georgia State University. Abandoning the practice of law altogether, he enrolled at the University of Michigan for his PhD, writing a dissertation on Walt Whitman and nineteenth-century American religion.

In 2014, Sowder traveled to India on a Fulbright Fellowship to study Indian literature and religion and work on a spiritual memoir.

He is the founder of the Amrita Sangha for Integral Spirituality, an organization that studies and teaches the practices of the world’s contemplative traditions.

A professor of English at Utah State University, and an affiliated faculty member in Utah State’s Religious Studies Program, he lives at the foot of the Bear River Mountains with his wife and two sons.