In 1995 Michael became the third Executive Director of the Missouri Humanities Council. Born in Trenton, New Jersey, he spent his childhood in the rural town of New Egypt until a family move to the newly-minted community of Levittown, Pennsylvania on his tenth birthday. He attended Penn State University, earning a B.A. and Master of Fine Arts in Music (voice and choral conducting). He took classes in Art History and creative writing and won a small poetry prize in his senior year. His graduate monograph was a critical appraisal of Beethoven’s song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte. While a graduate assistant he made his professional debut as a baritone with the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra and appeared on public television as the baritone soloist in a university performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Christmas oratorio, Hodie.

In an eight-year college teaching career, he began as a sabbatical replacement at the State University College in Oswego, New York; then found a position in Durango, Colorado at Fort Lewis College, where he gained experience in interdisciplinary courses and community outreach. After two years in Colorado, he was appointed Head of the Music Division at the College of Santa Fe, where he continued his involvement in interdisciplinary teaching and community outreach for the next five years. During his final two years in Santa Fe, he was engaged for two fall semesters as a Visiting Professor at Johnson State College in northern Vermont, where he met and studied poetry with the renowned poet and literary critic, Hayden Carruth.

At the end of the 1976-77 academic year, Michael accepted a position as Assistant Director of the Vermont Council on the Humanities and Public Issues, where he remained for the next eighteen years. He developed that Council’s first comprehensive Directory of Humanities Scholars in and near Vermont, created a Speakers Bureau, encouraged the Council’s first relationships with museums, planned annual humanities conferences, helped involve the Abenaki people in public programs, and encouraged the first library-based book discussion programs. These programs achieved phenomenal success and led directly to NEH support of the “Let’s Talk About It” programs of the American Library Association. The book discussion programs in Vermont evolved into a major line of recirculated programs handled by an allied organization and encompassing a “curriculum” of thirty-two humanities themes in the program’s fifteenth year.

His work with Vermont museums led to an assignment as the manager of a Governor’s Conference on preserving historical legacies and materials, an appointment to the strategic planning task force of the campus-like Shelburne Museum, and an appointment on the Vermont Statehood Bicentennial Commission. He was honored by the Living History Association for his work to help the association develop good relations with academic historians.

When he came to Missouri in 1995, Michael worked to concentrate MHC's best previous accomplishments into distinct, replicable services and programs. He converted the occasional program named "Parents as Teachers of the Humanities" into the statewide family reading initiative named READ from the START. RFTS is now the Council’s most extensive program. In 1998 he created a consulting service for local history organizations. This “charette” program concentrates on upgrading the practices of local museums and historic houses to promote more success with visitors and tourists.

In 2003 Michael completed the development of a four-state project that involved Native American communities in discussing the meanings of the Lewis and Clark expedition and national expansion. Funded by the $300,000 grant from the NEH Division of Public Programs, the two-year project served eighty-five rural venues in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. As a consequence of the network of friendships with tribal historians, Michael created a project whereby four tribes would work with Missouri museums and exhibit designers to create tribal heritages exhibits in their former homeland areas. A touring exhibit on Sac and Fox heritage was completed in June 2006. The exhibits on the Osage Heritage will open in Lexington in 2008, and the exhibit on the Missouri Shawnees and Delewares will open in Marble Hill in 2008.

During the 1980s Michael pursued an interest in photography, publishing numerous landscape images in Vermont Life magazine, calendars, and coffee table books. In the past decade his chief interests have centered on singing and horticulture. He has participated as an Artist in the biennial Pitten (Austria) International Music Festival in 1994 and 1998 through 2004. He has been a member of the Saint Louis Symphony Chorus since 1998.

His horticultural interest is focused on hybrid daylilies. He has been an amateur hybridizer of daylilies since 1994 and is currently a garden judge and garden judge instructor with the American Hemerocallis Society. 


He has registered five hybrid daylilies. His first, Hemerocallis 'David and Alan' (left), is named for the co-directors of the Pitten International Music Festival.

Michael is married to Sandra Sliker Bouman, a lyric soprano who is Director of Vocal Studies at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville. His daughter, Jennifer, is an attorney specializing in employment law in Portland, Oregon. His son, Ben, is a business services salesman in Denver.

Michael writes an occasional blog titled Creating Interest.

GOOD READS:
• Peace Like a River by Lief Enger.
The miraculous taken seriously in a story of a midwestern family.


• The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich.
What if St. Theresa and St. Cecelia were united in the character of a young nun who spends a very long life disguised as a Catholic priest among the Ojibwe people? As in every other book by Louise Erdrich, the characters become real on the first page, and turning the pages become a priority.

• Sign-Talker by James Alexander Thom.
The Lewis & Clark expedition as seen through the eyes of their excellent Shawnee hunter and guide, George Drouillard.

• Finding The West: Explorations With Lewis And Clark
by James P. Ronda
Superb essays and maps by a historian who sees the whole picture.

FAVORITE CDs:
• "Beyond the Missouri Sky," Charlie Hagan and Pat Metheny.
An acoustic fusion of jazz and new age music for guitar and bass by two Missouri natives.

• "Meeting At the River," Ry Cooder.
Music of India cross-pollinates music of America in this guitar-rich jam session.

• "Schubert Klaviersonate D.960," Stephen Kovacevich.
I have several recordings of this wonderful piano sonata, and they all reveal something different. Beguiling sound.

• "The Buena Vista Social Club" and several related CDs by the incomparable Compay Segundo.

updated Jan 11, 2008