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about michael mack
shorter bio
Award-winning poet, playwright, and performer Michael Mack is best known for his autobiographical solo plays Hearing Voices, Speaking in Tongues, about his mother's recovery from schizophrenia, and Conversations with My Molester: A Journey of Faith, about the spirituality of trauma.
Mack graduated from the Writing Program at MIT. His work has aired on NPR and has been published by America, Parabola, Journal of the American Medical Association, Beloit Poetry Journal, and twice has been anthologized in Best Catholic Writing.
In 2023 Mack won the Great American Fiction Contest published by The Saturday Evening Post. Other awards include Best Script at NYC's Midtown International Theatre Festival, First Prize in the Writers Circle National Poetry Competition, and two Fellowships in Dramatic Writing from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the state's most prestigious and competitive individual arts grant.
Mack has performed at the US Library of Congress, Yale University, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Austin International Poetry Festival, Off-Off-Broadway at the Times Square Arts Center, and at the FBI's 32nd Annual Hostage Negotiation Seminar. He has also performed at scores of venues for consumers and providers of mental health services, including McLean Psychiatric Hospital, the national conference of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), and for faculty and students of the Harvard Medical School.
longer bio
After serving in the US Air Force as an aircraft crew chief, Michael Mack worked a variety of factory and labor jobs before returning to school and graduating from the Writing Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studied poetry under Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, and was mentored by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin.
Mack's stories and poems have been published in America, Parabola, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Beloit Poetry Journal, Cumberland Poetry Review, and twice have been anthologized in Best Catholic Writing (2005 and 2007). His plays have been covered by The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Backstage Magazine, and on NPR.
In 2023 Mack won the Great American Fiction Contest published by The Saturday Evening Post. Other awards include Best Script at NYC's Midtown International Theatre Festival, First Prize in the Writers Circle National Poetry Competition, and an Eloranta Fellowship that funded a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for the Arts in Ireland.
Michael Mack is two-time winner of an Artist Fellowship in Dramatic Writing from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the state's most prestigious and competitive individual arts grant, for his autobiographical solo plays – in 2005 for Hearing Voices, Speaking in Tongues, about his mother's recovery from schizophrenia, and in 2013 for Conversations with My Molester: A Journey of Faith, about the spirituality of trauma.
Mack has performed at the US Library of Congress, Yale University, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Columbia Festival of the Arts, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the Austin International Poetry Festival, Off-Off-Broadway at the Times Square Arts Center, and at the FBI's 32nd Annual Hostage Negotiation Seminar.
He has also performed at scores of venues for consumers and providers of mental health services, including McLean Psychiatric Hospital, the national conference of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), and for faculty and students of the Harvard Medical School.
See artist resume for full list of performances, publications, awards, etc.
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