Michael Colbert loves coffee (his favorites are Costa Rican and Ethiopian) and horror films (his favorites are Candyman and The Silence of the Lambs), and he’s at work on a novel that combines both of those.

His writing appears in One Story, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Dwell, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, NYLON, Interview, Hazlitt, Electric Literature, The Florida Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Atlas Obscura, among others. He writes the books and pop culture newsletter, Referential, and is the founding editor of The Rejoinder; he has also served as a fiction reader for Ecotone and STORY. For No Contact, he was a prose editor and wrote Cinemacabre, a column weaving memoir and horror film criticism. A winner of the 2021 Shorter Fiction Prize, he has attended the Tin House Summer Workshop and was a 2021-2022 Brauer Fellow at UNCW.

Michael studied at Bowdoin College and earned his MFA in fiction at UNC Wilmington, where he also taught creative writing. In addition to his own writing, he has translated from Italian to English for such writers as Francesco Verso and Davide Camparsi. Born in Massachusetts, he has also lived in Maine, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Italy, and Japan.  

Contact: colbertmichaelj [at] gmail [dot] com

Agent: Mary C. Moore, Aevitas