Michael Crummey

Michael Crummey (born November 18, 1965) is a Canadian poet and a writer of historical fiction. His writing often draws on the history and landscape of Newfoundland and Labrador. Early life and education Crummey was born in Buchans, Newfoundland; he grew up there and in Wabush, Labrador, where he moved with his family in the late 1970s. He began to write poetry while studying at Memorial University in St. John's, where he won the university's Gregory J. Power Poetry Contest in 1986 and received a B.A. in English in 1987. He completed a M.A. at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1988, later leaving the Ph.D. program to pursue his writing career. Career In 1994, he became the first winner of the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award for young unpublished writers. His first volume of poetry, Arguments with Gravity (1996), won the Writer's Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry. Hard Light (1998), his second collection, was nominated for the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award in 1999. Also in 1998, Crummey published a collection of short stories, Flesh and Blood, all of which take place in the fictional mining community of Black Rock, which strongly resembles Buchans. That year Crummey was nominated for the Journey Prize.