Bio:Michael A. Arnzen

Michael A. Arnzen 

Michael Arnzen has been publishing outrageous horror fiction, SF, poetry, literary criticism, instructional essays on writing, and offbeat humor since 1989. Across his career, Arnzen has won three Bram Stoker Awards, an International Horror Guild Award, and several "Year's Best Horror Story" accolades and reprints. His books include the novels Play Dead and Grave Markings. Particularly known for his flash fiction (the best of which is collected in 100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories) and twisted short poems (published in seven chapbooks, including the Stoker-winning collection Freakcidents), the book Horror Fiction: An Introduction deemed Arnzen "the master of minimalist horror." Always the experimentalist, his writing has appeared on Palm Pilots and postcards, short art films ("Exquisite Corpse") and creepy online animation. His latest novel, Play Dead, even inspired a set of custom-designed playing cards.

When he's not writing, Arnzen teaches suspense and horror writing fulltime in the Masters degree program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University, near Pittsburgh, PA. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Oregon, where he studied "the uncanny" in popular culture, as well as an M.A. in English from the University of Idaho, where he wrote his second novel. Arnzen sits on the editorial board for two literary journals associated with genre fiction (Paradoxa and Dissections) and advises his college's literary magazine, Eye Contact.

Arnzen's most recent books are Licker (a comedic dark fantasy novelette) and Proverbs for Monsters (a full-length short story collection). Look for "Degrees of Dread"--his essay on horror, writer's workshops, and academia--in the recently published edition of On Writing Horror (ed. Mort Castle, Writer's Digest Books, November 2006).