American news reporter and columnist (born 1969)
Mike Allen (born 1969) is an American news reporter and columnist, as well as an editor and writer of speculative fiction and poetry.
Life
Allen is married to Anita Allen, with whom he runs Mythic Delirium Books.[1] In his day job, he is a news reporter and arts and culture columnist for a daily newspaper in Roanoke, Virginia,[1] where he currently lives.
Literary career
The Philadelphia Inquirer has described Allen as being "[a]mong the better-known practitioners of speculative poetry"[2] and said his poems "work best when his bizarre lyricism is put in the service of a scary and taut narrative."[2]
He served as president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association from 2004 to 2006. He created the small press poetry journal Mythic Delirium in 1998.[3][4]
Published biannually, the journal has included poems by authors such as Suzette Haden Elgin, Neil Gaiman, Theodora Goss, Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Darrell Schweitzer, Sonya Taaffe, Catherynne M. Valente, Ian Watson, and Jane Yolen. In 2013, Allen used the crowdfunding website Kickstarter to convert Mythic Delirium to a quarterly digital journal that publishes fiction and poetry.[5] Allen closed the journal in 2018 after publishing 20 digital issues and 50 issues overall.[6] For his work on Mythic Delirium, Allen was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2019.[7]
Allen also used Kickstarter to continue publishing Clockwork Phoenix, a fantasy fiction anthology series he began editing in 2008.[5][8][9]
Strange Horizons called the first crowdfunded volume, Clockwork Phoenix 4, a look into "the future of publishing, in which a crowd-sourced publication from a very small press can produce, and can present professionally and beautifully, work which is at the height of what is being written in genre."[10]
Recognition
Allen's short story "The Button Bin"[11] was a finalist for the 2008 Nebula Award for Best Short Story.[12] In 2015, his debut short story collection Unseaming was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award for best single author collection.[13] In 2017, an anthology he edited, Clockwork Phoenix 5, was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award for best anthology.[14] In 2021, Allen received a second Shirley Jackson Award nomination for his 2020 collection Aftermath of an Industrial Accident: Stories.[15]
Allen has won the Rhysling Award for best speculative poem three times, in 2003, 2006, and 2007.[16]
