Michael Morse is the author of Void and Compensation (Canarium Books, 2015), which was a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Poems for Morse often feel like rehearsals for and engagements with loss and connection—meditations in the hope that lyric singing might serve as some kind of compensation. Recent poems appear in the journals Ploughshares and The Literary Review, and in the anthology Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days (University of Iowa Press, 2010).
He was a fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown from 2008-2010 and teaches English at The Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City as well as poetry at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
During his MacDowell residencies, Morse has worked on several manuscripts with poems that have appeared in The American Poetry Review and The Best American Poetry. His book Void and Compensation included many poems composed and edited during MacDowell residencies. In 2025, Morse worked on new poems and continued to develop what will be a central long poem or book-length epistolary poem addressing his almost-daughter, the young woman whom he was not able to adopt two decades ago and whom he hopes is out thriving in the world.
