Michael Schmidt (Author, Edited by) Michael Schmidt is a poet, critic, and translator. He edits the leading poetry journal PN Review, is the editorial director of the Carcanet Press and director, the Writing Programme at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow. He was born in Mexico in 1947, and educated at Harvard and Oxford. His Lives of the Poets, a survey of English poetry from the fourteenth century to the present day, 'distinguished him as among the most vigilant of critics' (The Times).