Micah Dean Hicks
Photo by Scott Lerner 2018
Bio
Micah Dean Hicks is the author of the novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones (John Joseph Adams Books—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2019) and the story collection Electricity and Other Dreams (New American Press 2013). His writing has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, the New York Times, Lightspeed, Nightmare, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He has been awarded the Calvino Prize, the Arts & Letters Prize, and the Wabash Prize. Hicks was born in rural southwest Arkansas and now lives in Orlando with his wife, author Brenda Peynado. He teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida.
I’m humbled that these stories—drawing deeply from my boyhood spent lost in the tree-shrouded creek bottoms of rural Arkansas, full-lunged with the strangeness and quiet and need of where I grew up—would resonate with people from other places. I’m currently writing a new story collection drawing on fantasy, horror, and the fairy tale, standing at the unmarked border between popular and literary fiction, and it’s so affirming that the National Endowment for the Arts would see something of value in my work. This award from the NEA will allow me to better make time for writing when time is so hard to come by, and I am deeply grateful.