Biography of Michael Steinberg

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I was born and raised in Souteastern Connecticut way back in the late 1940s. My father was Jewish, my mother Catholic. I'm the oldest of four, and along the way my mother and subsequently the whole family converted to Judaism. This jagged bi-cultural experience left me with a sensitivity to being "the other." Besides that, my father was a US Marine combat vet in the South Pacific during World War II and then a drill instructor sergeant during the Korean "conflict." My coming of age coincided with the revolutions of the 1960s, and all this combined to help me find my meaning as an adult through an anti-authoritarian impulse, and to seek liberation in all forms, foreign and domestic.

I became an activist and took up many causes, anti-war, anti-nuke, food co-ops, music other cultural insurrections, the Irish freedom struggle, squatting in San Francisco, more recently defending my aging parents from the ravishes of age and a society that would just as soon throw them on the garbage heap.

All along the way I was inspired by great writers like Jack London, Emma Goldman, John Steinbeck, Iceberg Slim, Luis Rodriguez, Marge Piercy, Hunter Thompson and so many others too numerous to mention. Except that I should mention that B. Traven perhaps has had the greatest effect on me of all of these.

I eventually found a way to express my views in activism through writing, in journalism that dug up the dirt and threw it back in the face of the dirtbags. But I needed to find ways to express more, to dig down into the emotions that in the end are all we are, even though polite society does it's damndest to cover it all up and bury us alive from the day we're born.

Black Rain Press and the books and other writings I continue to scribble out provide a way for me to explore all these uncharted territories and worlds that once shall be, and let's me throw it all up in your faces to see how much you can take and how far we all can take it. Welcome!