Michael Sturdy

Michael Sturdy (born August 26, 1969) is an American poet and painter.
Sturdy has been writing poetry and painting since the early 1980s. He is the recipient of a National Scholastics Goldkey for his painting "Dancing Stalks". He began his writing career with the publication of the short story, "John Walker, and the wonders of his head," published in the magazine, "Yeah, Whatever!" in 1988. In the early 1990s, he began to edit for Berserk Publications.
Background
Sturdy was born in Detroit, Michigan, and was raised in Plymouth, MI. He attended Salem High School in the Plymouth-Canton Educational Park where he began his training under the guidance of Kris Darby and Graham Martin. After attending Salem High School, he attended Eastern Michigan University. While at Eastern, he studied with the notable writers, Clayton Eshleman, Larry Smith, and Janet Kauffman. He was also a pupil of Bei Dao. Since then, he has gone on to work as a journalist, an editor, and has contributed to the publication of textbooks, dictionaries and critical texts. He is currently teaching Western Literature at Tokyo Metropolitan University in Tokyo.
Style
From the late 1980s until very recently, Sturdy painted in the abstract-expressionist style. However, his style varies in that it attempts, not only to release the image, but to release the texture, the hue and the light of the emotive connections to the conscious mind through form and motion. Today, Sturdy paints with watercolors in an impressionistic style that attempts to create texture through a complexity of variation in hue as an emotive connection to the conscious mind: The play of lightness and darkness in hue, and the contrast between pigmentations, as seen in "the Venice Sketches", is used to replace the rawness of texture in his earlier abstract-expressionistic works.
Collections of Poetry
*Linewalking, 1992
*Expressions with the Hand, 1994
*Dharma's Daifuku, 2014
Previous Projects
*River Season Series (painting-Acrylic Abstract Expressionism)
*The Venice Sketches Series (painting-Watercolor Impressionism)
*Lonely Flower Series (painting-Watercolor Impressionism)
Current Projects
*Mountain Springs Series (painting-Watercolor Impressionism)

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