Michael Craft, whose full name is Michael Craft Johnson, was born in Elgin, Illinois in 1950. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earning his bachelor's in graphic design. After graduating he attended several years of graduate school at the University of Illinois Institute for Communications Research, but left in 1976 to pursue a career.

He soon received a position at the Chicago Tribune, where he worked for ten years as an art director for the editorial-design department. During his time at the Tribune, Craft moved to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he began using his long train commute to start writing his first novel. He also met his future husband Leon in 1982, and left the Tribune in 1987 to work for Leon’s family-owned business while writing on the side.

After a long period of revising and shopping around his first novel, in 1991 Craft secured his first literary contract with Los Hombres Press for Rehearsing, which was released in 1993. In 1995 he met literary agent Mitchell Waters, who agreed to take Craft on as his first client.

In 1996, Craft signed with Kensington Books for the first three books of the Mark Manning series, publishing Flight Dreams in 1997. In 2000, the Mark Manning series then moved St. Martin's Press, who published the next four Manning books as well as all four book in the Claire Gray series.

In 2005, Craft moved from Kenosha to Rancho Mirage, California, and also began pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, which he received in 2007.

In addition to the fourteen published novels written by Craft, he has also written two plays, and was involved in the production of the independent film Pink Squirrels in 2011.