Michael Mirolla

Calling himself a Toronto-Montreal corridor author (for his constant travels between the two), Michael Mirolla is a novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright. Publications include the novel Berlin (a finalist for the 2009 Indie Book Award), two short story collections—The Formal Logic of Emotion and Hothouse Loves & Other Tales, and a collection of poetry, Light And Time. An English-Italian bilingual collection of poetry Interstellar Distances/Distanze Interstellari is due out later in 2009 and an Italian translation of The Formal Logic of Emotion has been accepted for publication. His short story, “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence,” was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology, while another short story, “The Sand Flea,” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A poem, “Blind Alley,” was shortlisted for the Winston Collins/Descant Prize for the Best Canadian Poem in 2007, while another poem, “Moths and Trees,” took second price in the 2006 Association of Italian Canadian Writers Literary Contest. A poem, “Alternate Universes,” was accepted for the anthology in honour of Leonard Cohen’s 75^th birthday. His short fiction and poetry has been published in numerous journals in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, including several anthologies such as Event’s Peace & War Anthology, Telling Differences: New English Fiction from Quebec, Tesseracts 2: Canadian Science Fiction, the Collection of Italian-Canadian Fiction, and New Wave of Speculative Fiction Book 1. Michael attributes his literary success (whatever that may be) to his original teachers in the MFA Creative Writing program at UBC and to Jackie, his partner of almost 40 years.