Michael Fischer is a writer, instructor, and storyteller using personal narrative to transform how we engage people directly impacted by incarceration.
Michael Fischer is a humanities instructor in the Odyssey Project, a free college credit program for income-eligible adults. He’s a Luminarts Cultural Foundation fellow, Illinois Humanities Envisioning Justice commissioned humanist, and finalist for the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship and Education Trust Justice Fellows Policy Program. His nonfiction, which has been nominated multiple times for a Pushcart Prize and cited as notable in Best American Essays, appears in The New York Times, Salon, The Sun, Lit Hub, Guernica, Orion, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
A Moth StorySLAM winner, Michael tells stories in Moth Mainstage shows across the country and has been featured on the Outside Magazine Podcast, Modern Love: The Podcast, The Moth Radio Hour, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by the Illinois Arts Council, Ragdale Foundation, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Aspen Institute, and Esalen Institute, among others. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Reno and an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago.