Michael Ray Burch is an award-winning poet, essayist and editor of the poetry journal Romantics Quarterly (2001-2009), as well as the literary website The Hyper Texts (which since 2010 has published three Pulitzer Prize nominees and recent winners of the T.S. Eliot, Richard Wilbur and Howard Nemerov awards). His work is associated with the New Formalism and Neo-Romanticism movements, and has been published widely in American, English, Scottish, Canadian, Australian, South African and Indian literary journals and poetic websites, such as The Chariton Review, Numbat, Voices for Africa, Light Quarterly, Poet Lore, The Lyric, Verse, Unlikely Stories, Writer's Digest – The Year's Best Writing, The Best of the Eclectic Muse and ByLine. His poems focus on the dispossessed of the earth, past and present. He also was one of the first three judges of the Net Poetry & Arts Competition, and later served several poetry publications in either an advisory post or as a financial associate, including New Native Press, Romantics Quarterly, The Raintown Review and others. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife Elizabeth Harris Burch.