Michael Bishop was born in Lincoln, Nebraska on November 12, 1945.  His father being in the United States Air Force, his younger years were spent as what is commonly referred to as the life of an "air force brat".  His memories of a year in Japan at the tender age of four (see Washington Heights, Tokyo) were vivid enough in his later years to help write Under Heaven's Bridge (a collaboration with British writer Ian Watson).  On returning to the States, his mother and father divorced.  During the school year, Mike lived with his mother in Mulvane, Kansas (just south of Wichita and, as Van Luna, setting for the novella Blue Kansas Sky), and spent his summers with his father at various bases around the US.

        In his early teens Mike came upon the Classics Illustrated version of White Fang by Jack London, and it was this comic book — and others in the series — that he unashamedly admits was one of the largest influences on his desire to be a writer.  His high school years were spent in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with the exception of his senior year in which he attended a school for military dependants in Seville, Spain (see A Year of No Certain Historicity).  For a fictional account of his experiences abroad read On the Street of the Serpents.  Further stories that draw upon this background include Cold War Orphans, and the novel No Enemy But Time.

        Mike attended the University of Georgia, where he received his B.A. in 1967 with Phi Beta Kappa honors.  He earned a master's degree in English with a thesis on the poetry of Dylan Thomas (Dylan Thomas' Obscurity: The Legitimacy of Explication, University of Georgia, 1968).  He taught English at the Air Force Academy Preparatory School in Colorado Springs from 1968 to 1972, and later at the University of Georgia.  In 1969 he married Jeri Ellis Whitaker.  They have a son, Jamie, and a daughter, Stephanie, and two grandchildren.

        His first fiction sale was Piñon Fall (written in 1969, it was "the first story I wrote — that I was completely happy with, at any rate") published in  Galaxy for the grand sum of $100.  (See An Heir to Homer)  Having his name on the same cover with Robert Heinlein probably added more to his spirit than this sum added to his pocket.  He began submitting stories and within a few years had been published in all of the major genre magazines.  (See the Short Fiction Chronological Listing)  Based upon these stories, particularly The White Otters of Childhood and Death and Designation Among the Asadi, his reputation in the science fiction field was firmly established.  (See Literary Honors)  This prompted a decision in 1974 to leave his teaching position at the University of Georgia, and become a full-time writer.  Since then, he and his family have lived in the small West Georgia town of Pine Mountain.  This region is the setting for many short stories (including the Kudzu Valley stories), and the novels Who Made Stevie Crye?, Ancient of Days (Part One), The Secret Ascension (a parallel universe), and his latest, Brittle Innings, which Mike calls his "Southern Gothic World War Two Baseball Novel".

        During the early to mid-seventies, Mike wrote a series of stories set in a future Atlanta (including The Samurai and the Willows in F&SF ) that were later brought together as Catacomb Years.  The novel A Little Knowledge is also a part of this same future universe.  Some years later he created a parallel — but contemporaneous — Atlanta which he called Salonika for the novel Count Geiger's Blues.  Modern day Atlanta is featured in the acclaimed stories Within the Walls of Tyre and Life Regarded as a Jigsaw Puzzle of Highly Lustrous Cats, and in the novels Ancient of Days (Part Two) and Unicorn Mountain, which also draws upon his years in Colorado.

        In 1975 A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire was published — his first novel, and the first of what could be called "the anthropological novels" — and could be favorably compared to the early novels of Ursula K. Le Guin.  This group would also include Stolen Faces, Transfigurations, and Eyes of Fire, a complete rewrite of the first novel.  Even though later novels such as the Nebula Award-winning No Enemy But Time and Ancient of Days would also examine anthropological issues, their Earthly settings — prehistorical for the former and modern for the latter — would set them apart from the earlier "space operas".

        In fact, if the entire output of Michael Bishop's writing career were to be plotted, a definite arc would develop, revealing a gradual closing in from the ends of the universe to his own home town.  This graph would not only be geographical, but in a literary sense, expand from the machinations of the alien mind into the complexities of the human heart.