Michael Tod Edgerton (he/they) is a queer male poet of lyrically fluid gender and genre alike. Author of Vitreous Hide (Lavender Ink), Tod’s poems have appeared as the winner of the Boston Review and Five Fingers Review contests and in Denver Quarterly, EOAGH, Interim, New American Writing, Posit, Sonora Review, VOLT, and other journals. In addition to his MacDowell fellowship, he has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Napa Valley writers’ conferences. Tod holds an M.F.A. from Brown, a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia, currently teaches at San José State University, and serves on the poetry-editing team for Seneca Review. You can read about and contribute to his ongoing text-collage project at WhatMostVividly.com.
At MacDowell, he worked on his experimental verse play, Cissy Nicky Unreciprocated (A Femme Mani-Feste & Queerling Fantasia in Scenes Unwed). The play centers on three queer college kids as they negotiate their identities and desires, using the title character’s unreciprocated crush as a dramatic lure to bear witness to queer cultural and sexual “politics” and the loneliness endemic to sexual minorities while addressing broader sociopolitical and philosophical issues. In particular, the poem-scenes spotlight and resist the persistence — and post-Trump resurgence — of anti-LGBT bigotries, anti-Black racism, and patriarchy in the U.S. and throughout the world. This work has also been supported by a Research and Creative Activity Seed Grant from San José State University. Once completely polished and readied, Tod will seek publication of the book and funding to stage the play's first production.
