Michael Steinberg

About Mike Steinberg

I was born in New York, in Rockaway Beach, Queens, and I came of age in the 1950s. When I became a mid-life memoirist, I found that my richest work invariably resulted from mining my most vivid and powerful childhood and adolescent memories. In writing the memoir, Still Pitching, I discovered that almost everything important that shaped my adult identity--my passion for baseball, my love of books, theater, rock and roll, jazz and travel, as well as my stubborn tenacity and persistence, my sense of myself as an outsider, and my predilection for kvetching--all grew out of my New York Jewish childhood. I left New York when I was twenty-five and came to Michigan State in the mid-60s to get an M.A. and Ph.D. in English. Though I've lived and taught in Michigan for the better part of the last four decades, in my head, heart--and in my writing--I've never left New York.

Since I was a child, I've loved books and writing. In fact, I'd always harbored dreams becoming a writer. But I didn't seriously pursue that impulse until I was in my mid-forties. The reason being that I was not a very good poet or fiction writer--the two most prominent literary forms at the time. And because I'd read and taught so much "great" literature, I'd virtually talked myself into believing that my own writing would never measure up. For many years then, I was a writing/​composition teacher, a journalist, an occasional playwright, and a director of plays. Early on in my teaching career, however, I'd become enamored of the personal essay. I continued to write, write about, and teach the essay for almost two decades. In the early-90s, when creative nonfiction started to become more prominent, I began sending my work out to literary journals. At the same time, I wrote several essays about the form. In 1992, I went back to school, and in 1994, I got an M.F.A. in Creative Writing.

Up until that time, I'd always considered myself to be a teaching writer. In 1996, I co-authored (with Robert L. Root), Those Who Do Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching, a source book that grew out of our experience as co-coordinator of the Traverse Bay Writing Workshops, a writing conference for English teachers. After that, Root and I co-edited The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/​on Creative Nonfiction. We did the book because we wanted to use our own materials in our graduate seminars. It's now going into a fifth edition and has become a standard text in a number of college creative nonfiction and advanced composition courses.

In 1998, I founded the literary journal, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Over the past ten years, the journal has won ahalf-dozen Pushcart Prizes, received several citations in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing, as well as an Utne Reader Writing Excellence Award, and a first place award from The Travel Writers of America Society, among others.

As for my own work, in the past fifteen years I've published numerous personal essays and memoirs, as well as interviews and commentary in journals such as The Missouri Review, New Letters, The Bellingham Review, and The Florida Review, among many others. My essays and memoirs have been awarded several national awards, including The Missouri Review Editor's Prize, The National Harness Racing Writers of America Award for Feature Writing, a Writing Self Award, and a Roberts Writing Award. I've also had several pieces cited as "Notable Essays" in Best American Essays and Best American Sports Writing. Others have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

In 1984 I collaborated on a stage play I'm Almost Famous, with Bob Baldori. The play ran for seven weeks at the Apollo Theater in Chicago. From 1984-1993, I directed several plays for theaters in and around the Lansing, Michigan area.

I've also written reviews for The New York Times Sunday Book Review, as well as many feature magazine articles for national and regional magazines. From 1974-1976, I wrote a bimonthly column for the Detroit Free Press Magazine.

I divide my time between Lansing and Northport, Michigan where I live with my wife Carole, a visual artist and museum docent.


Selected Writing/​Editing Credits and Awards

Michael Steinberg is an American essayist/​memoirist. He’s the founding editor (1999) of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, an award-winning journal of literary nonfiction. Fourth Genre is one of three literary journals that exclusively publish works of creative nonfiction.

His memoir, Still Pitching, won the ForeWord Magazine 2003 Independent Press Memoir/​Autobiography of the Year. The Association of American University Presses also chose the book for inclusion on its list of "Books Selected for School Libraries.” And the Melton Center for Jewish Studies selected it for inclusion in "The American Jewish Story in Print," a national on-line directory.

Other books include Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs From Michigan--a 2000 Read Michigan selection, finalist for both the 2000 ForeWord Magazine Independent Press Anthology of the Year, and for the 2000 Great Lakes Book Sellers Award; The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/​on Creative Nonfiction (now in its sixth edition); Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching--the latter two with Robert Root Jr.; and The Writer's Way: A Process-to-Product Approach to Writing, with Clinton S. Burhans, Jr. He also co-wrote with boogie woogie piano player Bob Baldori I'm Almost Famous, a stage play that was produced in 1984 at the Apollo Theater in Chicago.

His personal essays and memoirs have appeared in many literary journals, and his work has won several national awards--including the Missouri Review Editor's Prize, the National Harness Racing Writers of America Feature Writing Award, and a Roberts Writing Award. A half-dozen pieces have been cited as" Notable Essays" in the Best American Essays, and Best American Sports Writing annual anthologies. Five others have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Teaching

Steinberg taught writing and literature at Michigan State University for 27 years. In addition, he was the founder and co-coordinator (with bob Root) of the Traverse Bay Summer Writing Workshops For Teachers (1986-1993), and the Michigan State University Overseas Writing Program (1990-1993). Since 1999, he has been on the faculty of three low-residency MFA programs: Vermont College; Stonecoast/​University of Southern Maine, and currently, the Solstice/​Pine Manor College program in Boston. He is a member of the founding faculty of the latter two programs.

He has presented workshops, craft talks and seminars at many colleges and universities, as well as at national and international writers' conferences including the Prague Summer Writing Program, the Paris Writer's Conference, the Geneva (Switzerland) Writer's Conference, the Kachemak Bay Writer’s Conference in Homer, Alaska, the California State University Summer Arts Festival, Writers' in Paradise in St. Petersburg (Florida), the Chautauqua Summer Writer’s Conference, and the Sanibel Island Writer’s Conference--among several others. In June of 2007, he was the Distinguished Nonfiction Writer-in-Residence at the NYU Summer Writing Intensive. Currently, he’s the Creative Nonfiction Writer-In Residence in the Solstice/​Pine Manor College low residency MFA program in Boston

Education

Steinberg has a PhD and MA in American Literature from Michigan State University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University, and a BA in English/​Theater Arts from Hofstra University.