Michael Yost

Biography

Michael Yost is the Director of Admissions at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. His years in the undergraduate program at Thomas More—where he found lasting friendships and mentors, met his wife, and developed many of the intellectual and religious interests that have continued to shape his life—have given Mr. Yost a particular appreciation for the College’s community of learning, friendship, and mentorship, and a desire to introduce that community to a new generation of students.

Born in Massachusetts and baptized at Boston’s Church of the Advent, he was raised in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Texas within the Anglo-Catholic tradition before entering into full communion with the Catholic Church through the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, receiving the sacrament of Confirmation in 2016.

Mr. Yost graduated from Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in 2018. While a student, he traveled in Italy, participated in the College’s Oxford Program, and pursued additional tutorials in economic philosophy, the philosophy and writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, the plays of William Shakespeare, and the history and theory of warfare. His senior thesis examined the liturgical and theological history of the English Reformation—its causes, its consequences, and the place of the Personal Ordinariates within the continuing life of the Catholic Church in light of Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus.

The summer following graduation, Mr. Yost married Mary Grace Yost (née Greer), a Thomas More alumna, Class of 2017. Together they have five children and reside in New Hampshire.

Following graduation, Mr. Yost taught literature, history, and philosophy for four years at Mount Royal Academy in Sunapee, New Hampshire. In 2023, he received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of St. Thomas (Houston), where, as a Scanlan Fellow, he studied under James Matthew Wilson and Dana Gioia.

Mr. Yost’s poetry, essays, and literary criticism have appeared in First Things, Modern Age, The University Bookman, Crisis Magazine, Dappled Things, and other publications. His writing explores the Western literary tradition through the lenses of philosophy, theology, and poetic form, with particular attention to epic, formalist poetry, and the great works of the classical and Christian imagination. Among the authors who have received particular attention in his work are Homer, Virgil, William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, and Cormac McCarthy. His first collection of poems, A Charm Against Eros, is forthcoming from Wipf and Stock.

Outside his work in admissions, Mr. Yost serves as Managing Editor of The Colosseum: A New Journal of Arts and Letters, which he co-founded with James Matthew Wilson. He contributes regularly to the journal, writes at his Substack, The Weight of Form, lectures occasionally on literature and poetry, and spends much of his time reading, writing, and strength training.