Michael Ernest Sweet

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[edit] Biographical Information

Michael Ernest Sweet was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia in 1979. He grew up on his family’s horse farm in the country. In grade ten Michael pitched the idea for a column on youth issues to his local newspaper and after being accepted continued to write for the Hants Journal as their youngest columnist until his graduation from Windsor Regional High School in 1998. He has over twenty published articles which convey youth perspectives on current events. That same year, Michael was appointed to serve an eighteen month term as President of the Nova Scotia Young LiberalsPress Clipping;one of the youngest Presidents to ever hold this post.

In 2000 Michael Sweet left the Liberal party and moved to Montreal, Quebec where he finished his bachelor of Humanities which was granted from St. Mary’s. In Montreal Michael was accepted into the Progressive Conservative Youth of Canada at the executive level as the Special Senior Advisor to then President Patrick Brown. Michael Sweet declared himself apolitical in 2002 just prior to entering his second degree; a bachelor of education at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario.

[edit] Educational Contributions

Michael Sweet returned to Montreal in 2003 and accepted a tenured post at the city’s largest English public school – Lester B. Pearson High School. At Pearson Michael developed the award winning teaching model Learning for a Cause which was awarded one of the 2006 Quebec Entrepreneurial Awards through the English Montreal School Board and was featured on a CTV (Canadian Television Network) news segment. The project is being renamed The Class Action Project and it encourages students to engage in the literary experience as a way to increase their social justice sensibilities and give them political voice. The project has published an international anthology of student writing and poetry titled Per Sempre and another publication titled IF is in progress.

Michael Sweet has also held other volunteer and community positions such as the project founder of a youth volunteer club at his hometown hospital, The Hants Community Hospital; himself serving over 150 hours of volunteer service in the program in 1996. Michael has been a faculty member of Lester B. Pearson’s board of governors and a member of the governor’s circle committee at the Montreal Children’s Hospital Foundation.

[edit] Publications

Among Michael’s many publications of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction are his books ab ovo and dances with love Amazon. Michael’s writing has also appeared in numerous magazines and journals such as Canadian Teacher, Ancient Heart, Bywords from the University of OttawaBywords,and anthologies like The Binnacle from the University of Maine where his poem Nude was an international finalist in the ultra-short competitionUniversity of Maine. He has edited two volumes of student writing Per Sempre in 2006 and IF in 2007.

[edit] Current Work

Currently Michael Sweet lives, writes and teaches in Montreal, Canada. He is a graduate student in the department of education at Concordia University. In 2006 he presented his monograph titled Below the Silence (about public schools and diverse sexualities) at the Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers. The work is under review for publication by The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services from Penn State. Michael Sweet is also the founder and current editor of The Poetry Review; a journal of modern poetry and literary criticism.