“Michael Loyd Gray’s prose unspools with the unmistakable cadence of a storyteller.”
–Stuart Dybek
Michael’s stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, La Piccioletta Barca, The Brussels Review, Alligator Juniper, Arkansas Review, Aura Literary Arts Review, Sagging Meniscus—The Exacting Clam, I-70 Review, Litro Magazine, Socjeta Literary Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, FictionWeek, New Plains Journal. Westchester Review, Flashpoint!, Black River Syllabary, Verdad, Palooka, Hektoen International, Potomac Review, Home Planet News, SORTES, The Zodiac Review, Literary Heist, Evening Street Press & Review, Two Thirds North, JONAH Magazine, Press Pause, El Portal, Shark Reef, Cholla Needles, The Waiting Room, Burningword Literary Journal, Your Impossible Voice, Litbop, Flare Journal, Fictional Café, The Mantelpiece, Deep Wild Journal, Wrath Bearing Tree, WINK, Bone Parade, OpenDoor Magazine, Brief Wilderness, Timada’s Diary, A Plate of Pandemic, Deep Overstock, SamFiftyFour, Otherwise Magazine, Taj Mahal Review, The Vincent Brothers Review, Commuter Lit, Sensitive Skin, BlazeVox, The RavensPerch, and Johnny America.
Michael is an invited member of the Society of Midland Authors and author of eight published books of fiction and fifty published stories. His novella Busted Flat, winner of a Literary Titan Award, was released in October 2024. The novella Donovan’s Revolution was released in June 2024. Forthcoming for January 2020 — Night Hawks, a novella.
Michael’s novel The Armageddon Two-Step, winner of a Book Excellence Award, was released in December 2019. His novel Well Deserved won the 2008 Sol Books Prose Series Prize and my novel Not Famous Anymore garnered a support grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation in 2009. The novel Exile on Kalamazoo Street was released in 2013. The Canary, which reveals the final days of Amelia Earhart, was released in 2011. King Biscuit, a Young Adult novel, was released in 2012. He is the winner of the 2005 Alligator Juniper Fiction Prize and 2005 The Writers Place Award for Fiction.
He earned a MFA in English in 1996 from Western Michigan University, where he was a Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society scholar (3.93 GPA). Michael was also a fiction editor for Third Coast, the WMU literary magazine. At WMU, he studied with MacArthur Fellow Stuart Dybek, Writer in Residence at Northwestern University, and John Smolens, former head of the MFA program at Northern Michigan University. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois, where I studied with Flannery O’Connor Award winner Daniel Curley. For ten years, he was a staff writer for newspapers in Arizona and Illinois.
Stories:
literally stories 