Michael McFee was born in 1954. He earned his B.A. (1976) and M.A. (1978) from
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He left graduate school to work a variety of jobs — editorial assistant, librarian, and freelance journalist among them — while he completed his first book. After it was published, he taught part-time at N.C. State University and the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In the late 1980s, McFee was poet-in-residence at
Cornell University and also at
Lawrence University. He began teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1990, where he is now Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program. In 2018, McFee was awarded the
North Carolina Award for literature, the state's highest civilian honor. ==Writings ==