Mikhail Iossel
Associate Professor
Concordia University
Mikhail Iossel, the Leningrad, USSR-born author of Notes From
Cyberground: Trumpland And My Old Soviet Feeling (New Europe Books),the
story collection Every Hunter Wants to Know (W. W. Norton) and
coeditor of the anthologies Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States
(Dalkey Archive, 2004) and Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia
(Tin House, 2010), is a professor of English/Creative Writing at Concordia
University in Montreal and the founding director of the Summer Literary
Seminars international program. Back in the Soviet Union, he worked as an
electromagnetic engineer/submarine demagnetizer and as roller-coaster security
guard, and belonged to the organization of samizdat writers, Club-81. He came
to the US in 1986, at the age of thirty, a whole and complete life behind him,
and started writing in English in 1988. Among his awards are Guggenheim, NEA,
and Stegner Fellowships. His stories and other prose, in English and in
translation to several languages, have appeared in NewYorker.com, Guernica,
Literarian, AGNI, North American Review, Threepenny
Review, Interia, Boulevard, Best American Short
Stories, and elsewhere.