Michael Punke

Michael W. Punke (born December 7, 1964) is an American author, attorney, academic, and policy analyst. He is a former Deputy United States Trade Representative and U.S. Ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2017, he became vice president for public policy at Amazon Web Services.

As an author, Punke is best known for writing The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge (2002), which was adapted into film as The Revenant (2015), directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, with a screenplay by Iñárritu and Mark L. Smith, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy.

Early life and education Punke was born and raised in Torrington, Wyoming, the son of Marilyn and Butch Punke, a high school biology teacher. He has a younger brother, Tim, and a sister, Amy. They engaged in various outdoor activities in the wilderness like fishing, hunting, hiking, shooting, and mountain biking. When he was a teenager, he also spent at least three summers working at the Fort Laramie National Historic Site as a "living history interpreter." He was also a debate team champion in high school, which he graduated early from to attend the University of Massachusetts Amherst, later transferring to George Washington University, where he graduated with a degree in International Affairs from the Elliott School of International Affairs. Punke also met his wife Traci while working for Baucus. During 1993–95, Punke then served at the White House as director for international economic affairs and was jointly appointed to the National Economic Council and the National Security Council.

Private sector work Punke has been a partner at the law firm of Mayer Brown, resident in the Washington, D.C. office and working on various matters involving international trade law. In the years of 2003 to 2009, Punke served as a consultant on various public policy matters and was also based in Missoula, Montana. In February 2017, Punke joined Amazon Web Services as Vice President for Global Public Policy.

Writing

The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge Punke is the author of The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge, which was published by Carroll & Graf in 2002. He came up with the idea to write the novel while on an airplane, after reading a couple of lines in a history book about real-life frontier fur trapper Hugh Glass. The subtitle of the book is "George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West."

Other writing work Punke wrote the introduction to a contemporary reprint of Mari Sandoz's 1954 book, The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men. He was the historical correspondent for Montana Quarterly magazine.