Browne, Michael Dennis

Michael Dennis Browne was born in Walton-on Thames, England. His father was an amateur organist and choirmaster in the local Catholic Church. Browne received his B.A. with first-class honors in 1962 from Hull University, and his M.A. from the University of Iowa.

Browne became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1978, and has been teaching since 1971 at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he is a Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of English.

He is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Things I Can’t Tell You (Carnegie Mellon University Press). Give Her the River, a picture book with paintings by Wendell Minor, was published in 2004 by Atheneum Books for Young Readers. Things I Can't Tell You, a new collection of poetry, was published in 2005 and My James Wright and Other Essays was published in 2008, both by Carnegie Mellon University Press.

His work has won many awards. Selected Poems 1965-1995, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, won the Minnesota Book Award for poetry in 1998; his previous book, You Won't Remember This, won a Minnesota Book Award in 1993.

What the Poem Wants (Carnegie Mellon University Press) was released in 2009. Also to be released in 2009 is a CD of To Be Certain of the Dawn (BIS Records), a post-Holocaust oratorio with music by Stephen Paulus.

(biographical information taken verbatim from various sources, including the Dictionary of Literary Biography, University of Iowa web site, and the Collegeville Institute website, a unit of St. Johns University in Collegeville, MN.)

From the guide to the Michael Dennis Browne Papers, 1960-2002, (University of Minnesota Libraries. Literary Manuscripts Collections, Manuscripts Division [mss])