Michael Anthony Cissell

Michael Anthony Cissell, 45 and ageless, died August 16, 2018. He is survived by his parents Linda and Paul; by his grandparents Charles and Marie Riggs; by his sisters Christi and Paula and his brother Jason; and by his wife Monica Eck Cissell and their two sons, Guthrie and Rohan, for whom, as he knew, the word "great" was invented. Michael was born in Paducah, Kentucky on October 26, 1972. He left for Wichita to earn a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry Writing and became a lively and popular educator in the English Departments at Wichita State, The Independent School, and Butler Community College, where he was known for expectations of high quality coupled with a friendly, understanding classroom vibe. Not surprisingly, he harbored a lifelong eager appetite for literary reading and for hunting out rare books, and this was joined by many other enthusiasms: acoustic and electric guitar, the music of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, disc golf, biking, soccer with his boys, collecting old manual typewriters, and restauranting with a wife who shared his gusto for life. His many friends knew him for his loyalty, his wry sense of humor, his zestful fellowship, his populist sensibility, his love of justice, his great moral integrity, and his enormous generosity of heart-even as he also had an infallible interior b.s. detector for the frauds and hypocrites of this world from the White House to the workplace. His modesty could shame us all: in a world where writers egos generate autobiographical statement of endless self-importance, the author statement in his first book of poems simply reads: "Michael Cissell lives in Wichita, KS." Wichita is lucky for that. The book, The Cutting Songs of the Butcher Son, published just three weeks before his passing, is available from Spartan Press and locally at Watermark Books. In the book of loving memory, he will never go out of print.