Michelangelo Tata received his M.A. in poetry in 1994. The title of his thesis was Primer for the Would-Be Gentle Man. He went on to earn an M.A. in Liberal Studies from the New School for Social Research, and completed his Ph.D. in English through the CUNY Graduate Center in 2004. His poetry and criticism have appeared in the journals Lit, Lungfull, kenning, Bad Subjects, Found Object, Rhizomes and to the quick, as well as the Critical Studies compilation From Virgin Land to Disney World: Nature and Its Discontents in the USA of Yesterday and Today (Editions Rodopi, 2001) and the Madonna Studies anthology Madonna’s Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to her Cultural Transformations, 1983-2003 (Ashgate, 2002).  His first chapbook of poetry, The Multiplication of Joy into Integers, won the 2002 Blue Light Poetry Prize and appeared in 2003.  His work is featured in the anthology The New Breed: Bad Boys, Gents and Barbarians II (Windstorm Creative, 2004).