Michael Heyman

Background

About Michael Heyman

Michael Heyman is a scholar, writer, and performer of literary nonsense and children's literature, and a Professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he teaches courses on children’s literature and music, poetry, performance/slam poetry, and arthropodiatry. His scholarly writing has appeared in various journals and books, including the ChLA Quarterly, The Horn Book Magazine, The Lion and the Unicorn, where he was also a four-time judge for the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry, in addition to Keywords for Children's Literature, and The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry. He was the chief editor of The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense (Penguin 2007). His poems and stories for children can be found in The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories (2005), The Moustache Maharishi and other unlikely stories (Scholastic 2007), This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse (Scholastic 2012, which he also edited), Poetry International (2019), and Whimsy (Ink Alchemy 2025). He was a guest editor for the nonsense literature issue of IBBY’s Bookbird (2016). He plays saxophone, guitar, flute, tabla, didgeridoo, and the diddlemaphone.