Micah Dean Hicks is an author of fabulism, speculative fiction, and horror. He received a PhD in creative writing from Florida State University, an MA in creative writing from the University of Southern Mississippi, and a BA in English from Southern Arkansas University. His first book, Electricity and Other Dreams, is a collection of Southern fables and fairy tales. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly declared that "With striking skill in form and vision, Hicks woos readers into his wrangled worlds." In his novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones, he imagines a collapsing rural town drowning in the literal ghosts of its past. Every character, house, and object is haunted, the swarm of unhappy spirits dwelling on everything they've lost and weighing down the living with supernatural curses and gifts. Author Julianna Baggott described it as "a stunning and profound debut." He recently won the 2025 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. His story collection Vulture Goldwill be published by the University of Nebraska Press in fall 2026. In these stories, teenage spirits drive around their hometown forever, two sisters find an oven that can resurrect the dead, and a man is hired to go into foreclosed homes and kill their monsters. His work has received a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, won the Calvino Prize, and received the bronze medal in the 2019 Florida Book Awards. His writing has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Gulf Coast, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and elsewhere. Dr. Hicks is an Assistant Professor in the department of English at USF. His recent teaching includes Writing the Novel and Writing Role-Playing Games. Outside of USF, he enjoys tabletop role-playing games and deep, dark forests. You can visit him online at micahdeanhicks.com.