Michelle attended Harvard University, and graduated magna cum laude from the department of English and American Language and Literature. During her years at college, Michelle interned at the Washington, D.C. Rape Crisis Center and was a peer counselor for Contact, a hotline and drop-in counseling center for sexual orientation issues. She also worked as a tutor for middle school students through Project COPE (Count on Plenty Education), and volunteered with elementary students through HAND (House and Neighborhood Development).  Michelle completed her masters in theological studies at Harvard Divinity School in Spring 2004, and received Massachusetts teaching certification in Secondary School English through the HDS Program in Religion and Secondary Education, a teacher training program designed to address the academic study of religion and religious issues in public schools in the United States.

Michelle’s first book of poetry, The Life of a Hunter, was published by Kuhl House Press at the University of Iowa in 2005. She is currently a Ph.D. student (ABD) and Teaching Fellow in the interdisciplinary American and New England Studies Program at Boston University, with major fields in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American Literature, U.S. Cinema, and U.S. Religious History since 1800. Michelle was awarded a research fellowship from the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston for summer 2008, where she will study early Christian Science and labor radicalism in Lynn, Massachusetts.