Michael Sharkey

In recent years, he has read poetry at Australian literary events including the Victorian Arts Festival, the Queensland Poetry Festival, the Sydney Poetry Festival and the Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival. He has also served as a judge of State-sponsored literary awards for the Northern Territory and New South Wales. In 2014 he was appointed editor of the Australian Poetry Journal, from which he retired in December 2016.

He was poetry editor, later coordinating editor of the Australian literary journal Ulitarra from 1992 to 2001, and has guest-edited poetry issues of other magazines including Hobo and Famous Reporter. He has also worked as a freelance writer, editor and publisher's reader, and as a Writer in the Community for the Box Hill-Doncaster Regional Library in Victoria and the Blue Mountains City Library in New South Wales.

Sharkey was an Associate Professor of Rhetorical Analysis, Writing, and American Literature at the School of English, Communication and Theatre at the University of New England from 1992 until his resignation in 2010.

Michael Sharkey is a biographer, poet and reviewer of Australian and New Zealand poetry and journalism, having published over 700 works. He established Fat Possum Press in Armidale NSW (1979–1986) with Winifred Belmont and co-edited with her Trans-Tasman Undercurrent literary magazine in Melbourne (1986). His poems have appeared in literary anthologies, journals and newspapers in Australia, New Zealand, India, the UK, USA, Canada, Mexico, Italy, Syria, China and France.

He studied at the University of Sydney, where he was awarded a BA degree in 1972, and then at the University of Auckland where he was awarded a PhD in 1976 for his dissertation on Lord Byron's poetical dramas.

His academic career included appointments as a Teaching Fellow in English literature at Sydney University (1972–73) and in New Zealand literature at Auckland University (1974), and as a Tutor in English at the University of New England (1977–81). He lectured in Australian and American literature, and in critical theory at the University of Southern Queensland (1983–84) and as a part-time lecturer in Australian cultural studies and Renaissance literature at Melbourne University of Technology (1985–87). He was an Assistant Professor of American and English literature at Bond University, Queensland from 1989 to 1990.

Michael Sharkey (born 1 August 1946 in Canterbury, New South Wales) is an Australian poet, resident in Castlemaine in the goldfields region of Victoria.