Michael P. Daley

In 2017, Daley founded First To Knock, a small press publisher and sometime record label.[12] First To Knock titles are irregularly published and include Echoes of a Natural World: Tales of the Strange & Estranged (2020), a weird fiction collection that featured contemporary fiction by Daley and others, alongside new translations of French authors such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Marcel Schwob, and Jean Lorrain.[13] [14] [15]

In 2018, Daley’s Bobby BlueJacket: The Tribe, The Joint, The Tulsa Underworld was published. Released on Daley’s First To Knock imprint, the book is a biography of a Native American career thief and safecracker who became a prison journalist and ultimately an Eastern Shawnee activist.[16] [17] Daley researched and wrote Bobby BlueJacket over a period of six years. Referencing the microhistorical approach in the book’s introduction, Bobby BlueJacket broaches larger questions about United States history through its specific focus on a single, relatively unknown individual.[18] Ron Padgett, an award-winning author and poet regarded the book as a "fascinating and richly detailed biography and an intimate portrait of complex emotional and intellectual life." Jack Womack, a Philip K. Dick awardee described BlueJacket as: "Insightful, angry, straightforward, reminiscent of the subterranean classic You Can't Win by Jack Black." Daley's BlueJacket was featured in Los Angeles Review of Books,[19] Tulsa World,[20] Weird History,[21] Bustle,[22] This Land Press,[23] and Public Radio Tulsa/NPR.[24] The book was nominated for best non-fiction work for the 30th annual Oklahoma Book Awards.[25]

Daley also co-authored and edited Enjoy The Experience: Homemade Records 1958–1992 (Sinecure Books, 2013),[26] which was featured in BBC,[27] Vice,[1] and was called "the greatest music book of the year" by Los Angeles Magazine.[28]