Michael Salcman (b.1946) was born in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia and came to the United States in 1949. He grew up in Brooklyn and started writing poetry at Midwood High School. He attended the combined six-year program in liberal arts and medical education at Boston University (B.A. & M.D. 1969), was a Fellow in neurophysiology at the National Institutes of Health and trained in neurosurgery at Columbia University's Neurological Institute. He served as Chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He is the author of almost 200 scientific and medical papers as well as six medical and scientific textbooks, most recently the revised Kempe's Operative Neurosurgery, translated into Spanish, German, Portuguese and Chinese editions. Special Lecturer in the Osher Institute at Towson University, he lectures widely on art and the brain. His art essays have received two Pushcart nominations and appear in Little Patuxent Review, Creative Non-Fiction, World Neurosurgery and Neurosurgery. His course How The Brain Works is available on the Knowledge Network of the New York Times. His poems appear in many journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Barrow Street, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Ontario Review, and Raritan, and have received six nominations for a Pushcart Prize and one for a Best of the Web Award. His work has been heard on NPR's All Things Considered and in Euphoria (2008), a documentary film on the brain and creativity. The Williams College Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art have commissioned poems; he also has given readings at the Library of Congress, National Academy of Sciences, the Pratt Library of Baltimore, the Academy of Medicine in Atlanta, the Writers Center in Bethesda and both the Bowery Poetry Club and the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York. He is the author of four poetry chapbooks, the most recent Stones In Our Pockets (Parallel Press, 2007), and two collections, The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises Press, 2007), nominated for The Poet's Prize and a Finalist for the Towson University Prize in Literature, and The Enemy of Good Is Better (Orchises, 2011). His anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors and diseases, Poetry in Medicine, is forthcoming (Persea, 2014). Michael and his wife Ilene live in Baltimore with a very demanding cat (Claude "Claws" Monet); they have two children who are presently out of the house, and two brilliant and beautiful grandchildren. They are avid sailors on the Chesapeake Bay but the cat is not.