In the Factory of Loathing

Michael N. Steffen (1958-2023) is the author of five poetry collections: No Good at Sea, Heart Murmur, Bad Behavior, Blood Narrative, and In the Factory of Loathing. He was a mentor for the PEN Prison Writing Program, and he won the Legible Press Poetry Prize, the Alsop Review Poetry Prize, and the Pennsylvania Poetry Society's Cecilia Parsons Miller Award, as well as a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. From 1996 to 2002, Steffen hosted the Riverside Reading Series in Easton, Pennsylvania. He died a week before his sixty-fifth birthday.