With her first two poetry collections, The Weight of Oranges and Miner's Pond, Michaels gained attention as a writer who balances technical precision with profound meditation and humanity.

"[4] With Fugitive Pieces, Michaels lays the thematic foundation of her future works, exploring the relationship between history and memory, and how we, as a people, remember.

While working on her second novel, The Winter Vault, Michaels released Skin Divers, her third poetry collection and the last of three volumes, beginning with The Weight of Oranges and Miner's Pond.

A collaboration with John Berger led to the development of Vanishing Points (2005), a profound meditation on railways, love and loss, directed by Simon McBurney, produced by Complicite and presented in the historic German Gymnasium in King's Cross.

She also contributed the libretto to Canadian composer Omar Daniel's The Passion of Lavinia Andronicus (2005), offering a new dimension to the tragic figure at the centre of one of Shakespeare's most harrowing plays in a performance by the Hilliard Ensemble and Tafelmusik Chamber Choir.

[6] Michaels would not publish The Winter Vault until 2009, thirteen years following the release of Fugitive Pieces which, likewise, took nearly a decade to write.

In 2011, Michaels contributed to the Bush Theatre's 24-hour performance of Sixty-Six Books to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, providing 66 playwrights, poets, songwriters, and novelists - of all faiths and none, from over a dozen countries and across five continents - the opportunity to respond to some of the oldest stories ever told.

[8] Michaels returned to poetry with the release of her book-length poem, Correspondences (2013), an historic and personal elegy in an accordion-style format that can be read frontwards or backwards.

A collaboration with artist Bernice Eisenstein, Correspondences alternates poetry with haunting portraits of the 20th century writers and thinkers to whom Michaels' pays tribute.

Incorporating spoken word and visual projections, Skin Divers explores "the body as a living archive of experience, or a museum of memory.