avg_rating: 3.95
name: Mike Allen
about: I was born in Minneapolis, Minn., six months before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.But my first childhood memories are of Guam island, where my father took a teaching job after receiving his Ph.D. It was a childhood of rocky beaches, skittering lizards and huge black-and-yellow spiders with webs that covered walls.My parents moved to a suburb outside Chicago, then to a small mining town in the Appalachian Mountains, where for good and for ill I spend most of my formative years. I didn’t fit in there, had little love for the strip mines or the native sons who bullied me, but I did spend many wonderful hours in a well-stocked library on a hill across town. My father, yes, made me read The Lord of the Rings, his favorite book, and hiking do I was born in Minneapolis, Minn., six months before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.But my first childhood memories are of Guam island, where my father took a teaching job after receiving his Ph.D. It was a childhood of rocky beaches, skittering lizards and huge black-and-yellow spiders with webs that covered walls.My parents moved to a suburb outside Chicago, then to a small mining town in the Appalachian Mountains, where for good and for ill I spend most of my formative years. I didn’t fit in there, had little love for the strip mines or the native sons who bullied me, but I did spend many wonderful hours in a well-stocked library on a hill across town. My father, yes, made me read The Lord of the Rings, his favorite book, and hiking down the paths that started there led me to H.P. Lovecraft and Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison and T.S. Eliot, Roger Zelazny and Stephen King. For years I had a subscription to Asimov’s Science Fiction, which functioned as my window into the “glamorous” world of speculative fiction.My family finally moved to Roanoke, Va., where I still live. In 1992, the year that Pope John Paul II forgave Galileo, I graduated from college, married Anita (nee Seth) and sold my first short story to a small press zine. Three years later, after earning my master’s degree (in creative writing, from Hollins University,) I made my first blip on the publishing radar by editing and printing New Dominions, a chapbook of stories and poems by Virginia writers such as Nelson S. Bond, Bud Webster, Paul Dellinger, Vickie Holt and R.H.W. Dillard (the title was a play on “The Old Dominion.”)That rather humble hand-made anthology (I pasted the pages in order and trimmed and stapled the first edition myself) launched a number of things. Because of it, I met people who became lifelong friends and creative partners; it also led to years working as a submissions reader and freelance editor for DNA Publications, a genre house that produced such magazines as Aboriginal Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude, Fantastic Stories and Weird Tales through the ’90s and early ’00s. It even played a role in landing me my newspaper job (I’ve been a writer of some form for The Roanoke Times since 1998.)Anita and I now live in a house we call “Stone Oak Croft” among too-tall trees beneath a pestilence of squirrels. We co-exist with and occasionally serve the whims of two eccentric young cats, Persephone and Pandora, who use our goofy galumphing dog Loki as a pillow and play-toy, much to his consternation.In my day job I’m the arts columnist for my city’s daily newspaper, but this website is all about what I do in my spare time. Here’s a list.‣ Since 1998 I’ve been editor, (and since 2006 publisher) of the biannual poetry journal Mythic Delirium, a zine that’s published work by Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jane Yolen, Joe Haldeman, Catherynne M. Valente, Theodora Goss, Ian Watson, Sonya Taaffe, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Jessica Paige Wick, Amal El-Mohtar, Samantha Henderson, Kendall Evans, Deborah P Kolodji, F.J. Bergmann, Erzebet YellowBoy Carr and many, many others. Four poems from our pages have gone on to win the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award for best speculative poem and reappear in the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula Awards Showcase series.‣ I’ve edited or co-edited several books, including The Alchemy of Stars (the anthology of all the poems which have won the Rhysling Award) the MYTHIC anthologies of fantasy poetry and fiction, and most recently the critically-acclaimed Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness anthology series for Norilana Books.‣ Clockwork Phoenix in particular became the focus of a lot of genre community attention, with starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, and stories included on the Locus Recommended Reading List, reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies and shortlisted for the Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and WSFA ...more