Michael Dennis Browne is an English-American poet and librettist. After graduating from the University of Iowa, he taught at Iowa, Columbia, Bennington, and the University of Minnesota. He is now a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, where he taught for 39 years, served a term as director of the creative writing program, and was a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers.
Browne’s poems have been published in many magazines and anthologies, and his awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation. Two of his collections have won the Minnesota Book Award for poetry. His most recent collection of poems, The Voices, was published by Carnegie Mellon in 2016. As a librettist, he has written many texts for music, working for many years with composer Stephen Paulus. Their post-Holocaust oratorio, To Be Certain of the Dawn, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Other composers he has worked with include John Foley S.J., Carolyn Jennings, Juliana Hall, Tim Takach, and Craig Hella Johnson, with whom he recently collaborated on Considering Matthew Shepard.
