Poet and essayist Michael Sowder is an associate professor of English at Utah State University, in Logan, Utah.
His poetry book, The Empty Boat,--a collection of Buddhist-, Taoist-inspired poems about the human relationship to the natural world--was chosen by Diane Wakoski from over 600 manuscripts to win the 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize, was a finalist for the Utah Book Award, and several of its poems were nominated for Pushcart Prizes.
Sowder is the poetry editor of the literary magazine: Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing. See http://websites.usu.edu/isotope/ for subscriptions and submission guidelines.
Whitman's Ecstatic Union, Sowder's study of Walt Whitman's poetry, was published in 2005 by Routledge Press. The study reads Leaves of Grass within the context of what Sowder calls the nineteenth century's antebellum culture of conversion, reading the ecstasy of conversion as an event that could produce both believers and rebels. The book reads Whitman's poetry as a sermonic performance seeking to convert its readers into Whitman's ideal of a "New American Personality."
Biographical:
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Michael Sowder moved with his family to Birmingham, Alabama, when he was nine. Graduating from the University of Alabama, he then obtained his law degree from the University of Washingtonin in Seattle, clerked for a federal judge, and worked as a lawyer for several years in Atlanta.
Realizing the error of his ways,
he began taking poetry writing courses from the poet David Bottoms at Georgia State
University in Atlanta. Completing the course work for his MFA, he abandoned the practice of law
(Petrarch -- ex-lawyer poet)
and enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he completed his MFA manuscript and wrote his dissertation on Walt Whitman. .
You can find Sowder’s poetry in such literary magazines as the Japanese journal Poetry Kanto, Poet Lore, Cutbank, Green Mountains Review, The South Carolina Review, Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review and The Wasatch Journal.
Sowder's chapbook, A Calendar of Crows, won the New Michigan Press chapbook award and
is available from New Michigan Press, Tucson, Arizona, http://newmichiganpress.com/nmp/det_sowder.html, and his chapbook, Cafe Midnight (with Margaret Aho) is available from Blue Scarab Press (Pocatello, ID).
(Appollo, with crow)
Sowder's creative nonfiction explores the natural world as well as the worlds of poetics, teaching, his Buddhist practice, and appear widely in magazines journals throughout the country. His essays include the following: "The Work the Landscape Calls Us To," in Placing the Academy (USU Press 2007) (nomiated for a Pushcart Prize); "The Chateau and the Chalkborad," an essay on writers as teachers, in Dislocate: The Literary Journal of the University of Minnesota (2006); "Place of Clear Light," an essay arising out of a visit to a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, in Salt Flats Annual (2007); “The Voice of the Wilderness,” in Snowy Egret (Fall 2002); “Radical Aesthetics in Walt Whitman, Jonathan Edwards, and American Beauty,” in Rendezvous (Fall, 2002); and Poet in Grizzly Gulch, a mountaineering essay in The Wasatch Journal.
Poet and essayist Michael Sowder is an associate professor of English at Utah State University, in Logan, Utah. 
University in Atlanta. Completing the course work for his MFA, he abandoned the practice of law
(Petrarch -- ex-lawyer poet) 
You can find Sowder’s poetry in such literary magazines as the Japanese journal Poetry Kanto, Poet Lore, Cutbank, Green Mountains Review, The South Carolina Review, Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review and The Wasatch Journal. 
is available from New Michigan Press, Tucson, Arizona, 
