Micah Dean Hicks Books in Order

Micah Dean Hicks grew up in rural southwest Arkansas, a landscape that still echoes through his fiction. His stories often begin in places that feel worn down or overlooked, then let something impossible move in: a ghost, a strange machine, an animal that may be more than an animal.

He built his writing life through school, workshops, and teaching. Hicks earned an English degree at Southern Arkansas University, then completed a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Southern Mississippi. His master’s thesis became the short-story collection Electricity and Other Dreams. He later received a doctorate in creative writing from Florida State University, with folklore as a minor.

That mix of fiction and folklore helps explain the shape of his work. Hicks draws on fairy tales, local legends, ghost stories, and the plain oddness of everyday life, but he places them beside factory jobs, family trouble, money worries, and small-town routines.

The strange is never far from the ordinary.

Electricity and Other Dreams arrived in 2013 after winning the New American Press Fiction Prize. The collection is packed with compact, off-kilter stories: people encounter ghosts, weather magic, transformed animals, curses, and inventions that make life even messier. The settings may be familiar, but the rules are not. Readers who like short fiction with dark humor and a fable-like edge have a lot to explore here.

His 2019 novel, Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones, takes that interest in folklore and places it in Swine Hill, a struggling factory town crowded with the dead. Jane and her family are each haunted in different ways, while economic decline, prejudice, grief, and fear turn the town toward violence. It is a ghost story, but also a book about what happens when a community has run out of hope.

Hicks returned to short fiction with Vulture Gold, a collection of modern fairy tales set in a world where the boundaries between people, animals, and the dead keep breaking down. Its characters include sisters with an oven that can bring back the dead, a boy with a swan’s wing, and people forced to reckon with secrets, loss, and desire.

He has also published stories and essays widely, and his work has appeared in major fiction anthologies and magazines. Along the way, he has received the Calvino Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship, and other awards for individual stories.

Teaching has been another steady part of his career. After teaching at several universities, Hicks moved to Tampa, where he teaches creative writing in the MFA program at the University of South Florida. His books remain rooted in the kind of questions that make a good folktale stick: What do people fear? What do they owe each other? And what might be waiting just outside the light?