My name is Michael Lee Vikre, I am a disabled, Norwegian American writer, educator and researcher. Author of the poetry collection "The Only Worlds We Know" (Button Poetry, 2019), I spent more than a decade prior to 2020 writing, touring, organizing and working with young people experiencing homelessness in my neighborhood. I sustained a traumatic brain injury in 2020 (and another in 2024), which fundamentally changed how I live, read, write, work and navigate the world. After dedicating the majority of my time to my recovery these past 6 years, I am emerging again. I am diminished in many ways, but not as a writer. My disability has restricted the ways I can engage the world in the day to day, but through these restrictions my writing has become more urgent. Both in its concerns in our political moment, but also insofar as it remains one of the few lines of work I can engage in regularly without a great cost to my health. In some ways, this is a blessing. My hand has been forced, and so I am writing my way back into, through and across, the world. I hope you'll assist me in doing so. Consider supporting me as a writer and specifically as a writer with chronic pain and disability that requires a great deal of financial resources to manage. I am embarking as a full time writer and researcher and will be splitting my time between Minneapolis and Norway these next few years. I am working on two books of poetry, a book of essays, a book of short stories and several academic articles. If you want to help guide these projects into the world, pitch in any amount you can. If you want to get a little extra, personal writing out of me and are able to pitch in a little more I'd surely appreciate it. I have come to find over the years that my writing is not mine alone, its yours too. As is the case with all language for it shapes the world we live in together.