Bio

Michael Heyman is The Fizzbert P. Pinkbottom Endowed Chair of Nonsense at Berklee College of Music (FPPECNBCM). He is a scholar and writer of literary nonsense and children’s literature, and a Professor of Nonsense, teaching courses on children’s literature and music, poetry, performance poetry, nonsense literature, monsterology and arthropodiatry. His articles have appeared in the ChLA Quarterly, The Horn Book Magazine, Words Without Borders, The European Journal of Humour Research, and 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. He is the head editor of The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense (Penguin). His poems and stories for children can be found in Poetry International, The Dirigible Balloon, The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories, The Moustache Maharishi and other unlikely stories (Scholastic), and This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse (Scholastic), the latter of which he also edited. He plays the saxophone, tablas, flute, didgeridoo, and the diddlemaphone. He is currently co-editing an annotated and expanded edition of Alan Watts’ 1967 Nonsense book, with Peter Columbus.