Kayleigh Michael

Oh, hai.

I’m Kayleigh Michael, a contemporary fiction author, essayist, and teacher from Northern New England, USA. I write for “humans who love people,” that is, people who like stories and essays that deal primarily in the human experience. How do we love, hate, grieve, laugh, and forgive? I hope my work shows you worlds you’ve walked through and characters you recognize: ordinary people navigating the heavy circumstances we all know or will know.

As I write this, I am going through it, too.

I’ve written fiction since I was a kid, and now I write and teach writing professionally. It makes me deeply grateful to have this outlet to express myself, and I hope you find comfort in my pages, as we grapple together with the toughest, most beautiful parts of being alive.

I help facilitate the community group Northampton Literary Society in Western Massachusetts, which provides free writing meet-ups, workshops, and open mics in my area. I teach composition at Southern New Hampshire University, where I also earned my MFA in October 2024. I am currently querying my first novel, Salt Moon and writing Sunday Missives on my Substack.