Literary Heist

Michael Loyd Gray is the author of six published novels. His 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 his novel Not Famous Anymore garnered a support grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation in 2009. His novel Exile on Kalamazoo Street was released in 2013, and he has co-authored the stage version. His novel The Canary, which reveals the final days of Amelia Earhart, was released in 2011. King Biscuit, his Young Adult novel, was released in 2012. He is the winner of the 2005 Alligator Juniper Fiction Prize and The Writers Place Award for Fiction in 2005. He was full-time lead faculty for creative writing and American/British literature at Aiken Technical College (South Carolina). His book of creative non-fiction, Sort of Still Original in Unoriginal Times, was published in 2016. He earned an M.F.A. in English in 1996 from Western Michigan University, where he was a Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society scholar (3.93 GPA). He 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 novelist John Smolens, former head of the MFA program at Northern Michigan University. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois, where he studied with Flannery O’Connor Award winner Daniel Curley. For ten years, he was a staff writer for newspapers in Arizona and Illinois.