Biography
Michael Perry is a New York Times bestselling author, humorist, corporate speaker, volunteer firefighter/first responder, and amateur snowplow driver. A lifelong resident of the rural Midwest, his “reflective roughneck” takes on life in Middle America have left hundreds of thousands of readers and live audiences laughing, nodding, and sometimes misty.
The author of over 25 books including Population 485, Truck: A Love Story, Forty Acres Deep, and Peaceful Persistence. Perry’s latest title is Improbable Mentors & Happy Tangents: How firefighters and poets, truckers and nurses, soldiers and singers, and other improbable individuals can show you the way in business and creativity.
Perry, a registered nurse who put himself through college working as a Wyoming cowboy and a roller-skating Snoopy produces the popular audio newsletter “Michael Perry’s Voice Mail,” performs widely as a humorist and speaker, tours with his band The Long Beds, works as a script writer, voiceover artist and audiobook narrator, and still makes an occasional call with the local volunteer fire and rescue service.
“I grew up on the wooden end of a pitchfork,” says Perry, “so no matter what I’m doing it’s my experience as a Wisconsin farm boy and a Wyoming ranch hand that informs my approach. And none of it—whether it’s a television documentary, a song, or a book—happens unless I sit down and write. Fortunately, writing is my favorite thing, and I’m grateful for the improbable mentors and happy tangents that delivered me to this place.”
Perry lives in rural Wisconsin and can be found online at www.sneezingcow.com.
View Perry’s complete backlist of books, humor recordings, music albums, and television specials here.
For information on booking Mike as a speaker/performer (and the wide range of audiences he has addressed), click here.
MISCELLANEOUS BIO NOTES
Mike is the author of over 25 books and over 300 articles and essays published in print and online for assignments taking him to the top of Mt. Rainier with Iraq War veterans, into the same room as the frozen head of Ted Williams, across the United States with truckers and country music singers, and—once—buck naked into a spray-tan booth. His work has been featured in numerous anthologies ranging from The Best Nature and Science Writing to Canning, Pickling and Freezing with Irma Harding to an Italian-language anthology of Midwestern writing. “As a writer,” says Perry, “I find my greatest privilege lies not in telling my story; it lies in being trusted to tell the story of another.”
In the essay collection Off Main Street, Perry wrote of how his nursing education prepared him to become a writer by training him in human assessment, and he credits singer-songwriters like Steve Earle and John Prine and poets like Lucille Clifton and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers with helping him understand that art could have a little dirt on its boots. Above all, he gives credit to his parents, of whom he says, “Anything good is because of them, everything else is simply not their fault.” His mother taught him to read and filled the house with books; his father taught him how to clean calf pens, of which Perry has written, “a childhood spent slinging manure – the metaphorical basis for a writing career.”
Perry has been involved in numerous musical collaborations, composing and performing “Winter Sleeper” with S. Carey and Ben Lester, co-writing “Red Leaf” with Grammy-nominated jazz pianist Geoffrey Keezer, co-writing “Deeper Kind” with Phil Cook, and composing liner notes for the John Prine tribute album “Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows,” (with Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon) and the Blind Boys of Alabama album “I’ll Find A Way.”
Of all these experiences, Perry says the single most meaningful thing he has ever done is serve 12 years beside his neighbors on the New Auburn Area Fire Department.
ODDMENTS
Perry’s prose, poetry, and song lyrics have been reproduced on a bridge dedication plaque, incorporated into the décor of a boutique hotel, inscribed on the cab of a logging truck, and inked into numerous tattoos.
Perry has autographed an ambulance.
The handwriting in this Taylor Swift/Big Red Machine video is Perry’s (one NSFW word).
Perry’s book Truck: A Love Story is visible on the floor of a house featured in an episode of the television show Hoarders.
Perry’s name can be found on a Bon Iver poster in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Perry once left the stage mid-performance to attend to someone who had a seizure and fell down the theatre stairs, then finished the show with a defibrillator and EMT kit onstage beside his mic stand.
Perry’s first non-self-published book was Successful Fund-Raising for the Average Idiot: Or Group of Idiots Above Average Idiots Welcome (1991).