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Micah Dean Hicks’s debut novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones is forthcoming in 2019 from John Joseph Adams Books. His story collection Electricity and Other Dreams—a book of dark fairy tales and bizarre fables—won the 2012 New American Fiction Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Chicago Tribune, Witness, and others. He has won the Calvino Prize, Arts & Letters Prize, and Wabash Prize. Hicks grew up in rural southwest Arkansas and now lives in Orlando, Florida. He teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida.

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From Publisher's Weekly:

“In his debut story collection, Hicks presents a compact, impressive array of the strange and the eerie, the alien and the endearing. Hicks maintains a distinct and truly original style throughout all 26 stories using off-beat perspectives and grotesque imagery. Amid the 26 stories are inexorable curses, unexplained transformations, killing lies, electrical elements in human form, epically ludicrous sword fights, exorcisms, weather magic, and more. All are carefully sculpted confections, though they vary in length. “Railroad Burial” and “Watermelon Seeds” pack the punches into just two pages each, whereas “The Hairdresser, the Giant, and the King of Roses” is a longer burn. Hicks’s protagonists seem oddly comfortable brushing up against the fantastic and the divine, taking in wonders and miracles as matter-of-factly as they might a new truck; this in no way diminishes the wonders they encounter. Hicks resists the tropes of any one genre, instead he embraces all manner of influences from the mundane to the fantastic. With striking skill in form and vision, Hicks woos readers into his wrangled worlds. (Dec.)”