My book of creative nonfiction, Tell Me about Your Bad Guys: Fathering in Anxious Times, features in the University of Nebraska Press’s American Lives series (2025). ORDER THE BOOK HERE! Or here. Or here.

My essay about reading from the book in public, “Ancestors and Anxious Dads”, appears on the University of Nebraska Press’s Behind the Book blog. (April 18, 2025).

BOOKLIST (ALA) exclusive online review HERE (March 11, 2025) and a lovely writeup at Villanova’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (April 29, 2025).

“In Tell Me about Your Bad Guys, Michael Dowdy sets out to write a lyrical and critical book about fathers, about fathering, and about raising a daughter in the Anthropocene. He accomplishes this task with bravery and clarity, but his engaging and powerful book does much more. Through an intricate weaving of poetry, literary sleuthing, personal history, and ecocriticism, Dowdy ingeniously extends genre boundaries to allow us to see how, in the right hands, poignant discussions of vulnerability, money, race, economics, and our very own survival, can all come together as art to ask the most difficult questions about who we are and how we live in a world that is always destroying itself.” –Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award winning author of The Performance of Becoming Human

“In Michael Dowdy’s superb essay collection Tell Me about Your Bad Guys, a father thinks through what it means to raise a child while reckoning with all that is terrifying and broken in this world. Here we bear witness to the tender intimacy between parent and child, which simultaneously never lets us look away from climate change, gun violence, the migrant crisis, and more. These agile, moving investigations of how to love and think are a must-read for anyone trying to care for another in a violent world, which is to say, everyone.” –Tessa Fontaine, author of The Red Grove

“Many fatherhood-themed books are heavily memoiristic, telling specific stories and charting a linear narrative forward. Tell Me about Your Bad Guys distinguishes itself by being more inward turning and experimenting with form. It raises questions about those more traditional renderings of fatherhood by revealing the complexity that often gets blurred out in order to produce a cogent narrative. The essays do more than tell stories—they engage the larger questions of our time and do so with an evocative style.” –Steve Edwards, author of Breaking into the Backcountry

Some of the lyric essays that feature in Tell Me About Your Bad Guys first appeared in some of the publications linked below.

“Tiny Towns” features in the Winter 2022 (Vol. 50.1) issue of Appalachian Review.

“Elementary Primer” features in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays, edited by Randon Billings Noble and published by the University of Nebraska Press. 2021 FINALIST, Foreword Reviews, FOREWORD INDIES.

“In the Forginning” is in Issue 48.2 (Spring/Summer 2020) of Cold Mountain Review.

“My Bitter Beer Face” is up at the museum of americana in Issue 22 (Fall 2020).

“What We Take from the Anne Frank House” features in Issue 25 (Spring 2020) of Superstition Review.

“Matilda the Trail Fairy” is published in Issue 49 (Spring 2020) of storySouth.

“The Night After Newtown” appears in Issue 23 (Fall 2019) of Waccamaw: A Journal of Contemporary Literature.

“South Padre Island: A Crash Course in Fatherhood and Patriarchy” appears in the fall 2018 edition of Scalawag. 

Also in this issue of Scalawag is a must-read series of Latinx poetry from the U.S. South, “This Work Will Take Dancing,” introduced by Suzi F. Garcia.

“Rappalachia 911” appears in issue 8 (Fall 2019) of HeartWood Literary Magazine.

“Mountainsickness” won the annual nonfiction contest for 2017 at Still: The Journal. The essay is a companion to my book Urbilly, introduced here by Sarah Einstein.