Mike Bernhardt

Mike Bernhardt’s personal journey with grief and poetry began when his first wife died in 1991. To express feelings that were often overwhelming, he turned to writing poetry. He also searched for books containing other people’s poems about grieving the death of a loved one but found little that moved him. So, he decided to create his own book. After advertising a request for submissions, he received hundreds of poems from around the world. He chose the ones that spoke to him the most and published an anthology of 65 poems called Voices of the Grieving Heart.

In 2020, with the mounting death toll and pervasive grief in the world due to the pandemic, Mike saw a need to publish a new edition of the book. He again solicited poems about grieving loved ones, and in 2021 published an expanded volume with over 160 selected poems, essays, and images by 83 contributors sharing their experiences of loss, grief, and transformation.

To listen to some of the contributors reading their own poems from the book, go to https://mikebernhardt.net/poems.

Mike is a Certified Grief Educator and is trained as a facilitator in Poetry as a Tool for Wellness. He has been interviewed about grief, and the power of poetry to express the inexpressible, on radio and on a number of podcasts, including Open to Hope. He has been a presenter at various organizations including the National Association for Poetry Therapy and Rotary International. His poems also appear in the book Finding What You Didn't Lose: Expressing Your Truth and Creativity through Poem-Making, by John Fox.

Mike and his second wife live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Visit his website at https://mikebernhardt.net.