Michael Swierz is a poet, maker, and participatory ecologist. His work synthesizes aspects of poetry, visual art, translation, subsistence, earth repair, and interspecies communication. He has tended livestock, lived in a rural Nahuatl-speaking community, gathered ancient prairie seed from the remnant railroad areas in the Midwest. He lives at House on the Prairie, a rural homestead with a 15-acre prairie reconstruction 72 miles southwest of Chicago.