Seth Michelson

Seth Michelson is an award-winning professor and poet specializing in state violence, incarceration, and the poetry of the hemispheric Americas. To date, he has published many works such as academic articles, book chapters, film and book reviews, essays, fourteen books of original poetry and poetry in translation. As Seth writes both in English and Spanish, his work has been published in countries such as Argentina, Mexico, England, Italy, Kenya, India, and more. Seth has taught at universities around the globe and thus has lived in countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Puerto Rico. He has won many awards for his work as a teacher-scholar, such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the US Library of Congress Award and the Pushcart Prize for Small Presses. He is currently the nominee from Washington and Lee University for the 2020 Virginia outstanding Faculty Awards. Seth has also recently been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 2022, which he used to travel to Uruguay and continue his work with immigrants there.

HOPE ON THE BORDER (Current Affairs, Poetry, Published: Morehouse-Church Publishing)

HOPE ON THE BORDER came to life as a result of Seth Michelson's personal experiences working at various immigrant detention centers, where he taught immigrant children poetry workshops as a way for them to cope with the trauma they had experienced at a very young age. The weekly poetry workshops that Seth held in the most restrictive maximum-security detention center in the US for undocumented, unaccompanied children, were for the incarcerated children at the facility, who were being held in isolation cells. The children would attend these workshops, thereby enabling Seth to provide them with a place where they could live as a mutually supportive community of creators, and not as prisoners of a cruel and dysfunctional system. While exploring the deeply personal and often grippingly intense stories of these incarcerated youths and immigrants, HOPE ON THE BORDER delves into the lived tales of refugee children and women as they make their journey across the border, all too often fleeing harrowing circumstances. Meanwhile, the book delves into the long history of immigration in the United States, thus exploring the real roots of the “land of the free”.

Rights Sold: World
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Agent: Zeynep Sen