About Michael Phan
My name is Alexa Young
Artist Bio
After a decade and a half of online blogging, Michael is editing his first volume of poetry, and will be seeking a publisher later this year.
His poems were initially posted to a now dormant WordPress blog entitled grapeling. For the past 15 years, he has participated in several online poetry communities that offer prompts, feedback, camaraderie, and a sense of belonging. He’s happy to have discovered the vibrant in-person poetry community in Santa Cruz.
A Monterey Bay native, he returned to the coast in June 2024.
At age 22, he spent 4 months traveling across Africa in a truck with 15 at-first strangers. It was his daily task to dig and then bury the latrine, which gave him an appreciation for digging deep, brevity, and inevitable conclusions. Also, that location is key.
Before, he grew up in Pacific Grove and then attended Cal (first majoring in Engineering, then in Rhetoric), and later lived in both Nocal and Socal. Presently he resides a short walk from Seascape Park Beach, where Wandering Tattlers and Sanderlings patrol the shoreline, and pelicans and their attendant gulls splash for baitfish in the shallow surf.
To pay for a roof and help cover his sons’ college tuition, he translates spreadsheets into t-shirts.
On a quarterly basis, he waits for an oncologist’s update. Meanwhile, to spite the inevitable he walks, hikes, and goes to the gym, because, as it is said, Fuck Cancer.
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Artist’s Statement
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Veins that sometimes bleed together in his work include the natural world; love and its ghost twin anti-love; family; death’s remnants in the living; climate change; and cancer.
Also, dogs, because they know much better than he does, nothing matters more than right now.
Thanks especially are due to Tom Brady and Satori Arts, Geneffa Jahan, and David Sullivan for their encouragement and welcome to the vibrant Santa Cruz poetry community, and to the Muse, however silent and distant she may be, because she knows that green is his favorite color.
Michael Phan