Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Mike Barnes


Mike Barnes is the author of Calm Jazz Sea, (a poetry book shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award) and Aquarium, a collection of short fiction which won the 1999 Danuta Gleed Award. His stories have appeared twice in Best Canadian Stories, three times in The Journey Prize Anthology, and he won the Silver Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards. His most recent book is The Lily Pond (Biblioasis, 2008), a memoir that explores the author's thirty-plus years of living with bipolar disorder. It chronicles unflinchingly the destructiveness of an illness that infiltrates thinking, feeling and acting in ways that change the very fabric of identity. It is equally searching in its exploration of the psyche's resources in healing and reknitting that identity. Born in Minnesota, a joint U.S.-Canadian citizen, Barnes lives and writes in Toronto.

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