Mike Allen (poet)

Mike Allen (born 1969) is an American editor and writer of speculative fiction and poetry. He currently lives in Roanoke, Virginia.

His short story "The Button Bin"[1] was a finalist for the 2008 Nebula Award for Best Short Story.[2] In 2015, his debut short story collection Unseaming was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award for best single author collection.[3] In 2017, an anthology he edited, Clockwork Phoenix 5, was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award for best anthology.[4]

The Philadelphia Inquirer has described Allen as being "[a]mong the better-known practitioners of speculative poetry"[5] and said his poems "work best when his bizarre lyricism is put in the service of a scary and taut narrative."[5]

Allen has won the Rhysling Award for best speculative poem three times, in 2003, 2006, and 2007.[6] He served as President of the Science Fiction Poetry Association from 2004-06. He created the small press poetry journal Mythic Delirium in 1998.[7][8]

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.[9] Allen closed the journal in 2018 after publishing 20 digital issues and 50 issues overall.[10] For his work on Mythic Delirium, Allen was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2019.[11]

Allen also used Kickstarter to continue publishing Clockwork Phoenix, a fantasy fiction anthology series he began editing in 2008.[9][12][13]

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."[14]