Michael Gregory is the founding director of the Central School Project, an artists and environmental activists cooperative begun in 1982 which has turned the 1904 three-storey Central School building into a community arts and ecology center in Bisbee, Arizona, widely recognized for its juried art exhibits and Poets Voice reading series. He is owner/printer of the Mother Duck Press, co-founder of the non-profit Bisbee Press Collective and co-founder of the Bisbee Poetry Festival (1978-1998).
He is also founding director of Arizona Toxics Information, a non-profit research and policy organization based in Bisbee, Arizona which advocates for public participation, pollution prevention and citizen right to know in regard to hazardous materials management. Prior to forming ATI in 1990, he was for several years Conservation Chairman of the Sierra Club's Grand Canyon (Arizona) Chapter, and is a former Hazardous Materials Coordinator and Emergency Services Director for Cochise County, Arizona. He currently serves on the Sierra Club’s national Conservation Governance Committee, which oversees the organization’s conservation program.
His poetry has appeared in, among others, Antioch Review, Epoch, Epos, Invisible City, Massachusetts Quarterly Review, Meanjin Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Steelhead, The Temple and Poetry Northwest. His books include The Valley Floor and the two-volume Hunger Weather 1959-1975 (both in limited editions from Mother Duck Press), and Re:Play(Pudding House Press). His work has appeared in several anthologies, including Song of the Beast (with David Chorlton and Chris Dietz), The Bisbee Anthology and In the Eye (Thunder Rain, 2007). One of his poems was chosen by Gary Snyder as winner of the 2002 Tucson Poetry Festival statewide contest, and in November of that year he received a Creative Writing Fellowship for Poetry from the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
He has authored over 100 papers and book-length monographs on environmental topics; with articles in such publications as the Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation, Environmental Carcinogenesis Reviews and Columbia Journal of World Business; titles of longer works (written under contract to such organizations as the US EPA and North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation) include Public Access to Environmental Information in Mexico and the United States; A Toxics Data Dictionary for the Tijuana River Watershed Geographical Information System; and A Bilingual Vocabulary of Environmental Planning Terms for the US-Mexico Border.
He holds an interdepartmental BA in History, English and Philosophy from Toledo University, an MA in English from Pennsylvania State University, and has done advanced work at the University of California at Irvine and at the UCLA Center for the Study of Comparative Folklore and Mythology. He has taught literature, composition and history at several colleges and universities including, in Arizona, Cochise College and Prescott College.
Since 1973 he has lived off the grid on 40 acres of high desert grassland in the Sulphur Springs Valley of southeast Arizona, near the US/Mexico border, where he raises organic fruits and vegetables.