M. L. Liebler is an internationally known and widely published Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist, and arts organizer, and he is the author of 13 books and chapbooks including the award-winning Wide Awake in Someone Else’s Dream (Wayne State University Press, 2008), featuring poems written in and about Russia, Israel, Germany, Alaska, and Detroit. Wide Awake won both the Paterson Poetry Prize for Literary Excellence and the American Indie Book Award for 2009. In 2005, he was named St. Clair Shores (his hometown) first Poet Laureate. Liebler has read and performed his work in Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, Macao, Italy, Germany, Spain, Finland, and most of the 50 States. M. L. Liebler has taught English, creative writing, American studies, labor studies, and world literature at Wayne State University in Detroit since 1980, and he is the founding director of both The National Writer’s Voice Project in Detroit and the Springfed Arts: Metro Detroit Writers Literary Arts Organization. He was selected as the Best Detroit Poet by The Detroit Free Press and Detroit’s Metro Time, and he was the nation’s first ever Artist in Residence for a Public Library at The Chelsea District Library for 2008-2009. In 2010, he received the Barnes and Noble Poets and Writers Writers for Writers Award with Maxine Hong Kingston and Junot Diaz. In 2011, his groundbreaking anthology Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams (Coffee House Press) was given a 2011 Library of Michigan Notable Book Award. In 2016, he will release a new collection of poems entitled I Want to Be Once (Wayne State University Press / Made in Michigan Series), Heaven Was Detroit: An Anthology of Detroit Music Essays from Jazz to Hiphop (Editor), and Bob Seger’s House: An Anthology of Michigan Short Stories (Co-Editor with Mike Delp). Forthcoming recordings and vinyl include Poetry Score: M. L. Liebler and Al Kooper and Howlin at the Moon by M. L. Liebler and the Coyote Monk Poetry Band.