ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Sykes

author

Michael Sykes was born in New York City in 1943 and lived on Cape Cod through his “formative years,” after which he lit out for the West Coast in 1961 to attend San Francisco State. After some east coast/west coast back and forth he settled into the Writing Program at SF State from 1964 to 1968 (B.A., 1966, M.A. 1968), was accepted as a Ph.D. candidate into the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in the Fall of 1969 but opened a bookstore in Point Reyes Station instead. He began publishing under the Floating Island imprint in 1976 and by 2022 had opened eight bookstores and published 54 titles including the four anthologies, Floating Island I-IV. His first book of poems, From an Island in Time, was published in 1984 by Jungle Garden Press. He has two sons and three grandchildren and lives in Cedarville in the far northeastern corner of California on the edge of the Great Basin Desert where he owns and operates Floating Island Books.