Until We Have Faces

Michael Nye is the author of the story collection Strategies Against Extinction and All the Castles Burned. He was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and attended Ohio State University, where he graduated with a BA in English Literature, and the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he earned his MFA in creative writing. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Literary Review, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Crab Orchard Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review, New South, Normal School, Sou’wester, and South Dakota Review, among many others. His work has been a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in fiction and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He and his wife live in Washington, D.C.

“The characters in Michael Nye’s brilliant collection all fight against a central question: what is so tragic about being unremarkable? Their dashed desires become their fuel, their desperation becomes their hope. Home, identity, race, love, loss—these themes reverberate in stories full of yearning, on paths toward selfhood marked by fragmentation. To step into the lives portrayed in Until We Have Faces is to feel, as one character notes, released from a cage after a long incarceration. We believe in their resilience because it is our resilience.”– Carolyn Ferrell, award-winning author of Don’t Erase Me