Paola Ferrante is a woman writer living with depression. Her first short fiction collection, Her Body Among Animals, is forthcoming September 12, 2023 from Book*hug Press and is now available for pre-order! Her Body Among Animals received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, which said “There is no filler here; each story is devastating, brilliantly imaginative, and almost impossible to summarize neatly. Ferrante is a vital new voice in short fiction.”
Her latest poetry chapbook is The Dark Unwind (knifeforkbook, 2022).
Paola Ferrante’s debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack, (Mansfield Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She was longlisted for the 2020 Journey Prize for “When Foxes Die Electric,” a story that judges Amy Jones, Doretta Lau and Téa Mutonji described as “surprising, wielding sci-fi conventions with ease while upending our expectations of the genre,” and having “prose [that] carries a charge.” She won Room‘s 2018 prize for Fiction, as selected by Zoe Whittall, and Grain’s Short Grain 2020 Prize for Poetry. She also won The New Quarterly’s 2019 Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award for “The Underside of a Wing,” which the judges described as “demonstrat[ing] the kind of fluorescent immanence short fiction can achieve….This story feasts on the ruins of formulaic narrative and lingers darkly in the mind.” Her work has appeared in The Journey Prize Stories 32 (McClelland & Stewart, 2020), Best Canadian Poetry, 2021 (Biblioasis, 2021), The Master’s Review Anthology Volume IX (2020), North American Review, PRISM International, and elsewhere. She is the former Poetry Editor at Minola Review and lives in Toronto, Canada with her spouse Mat, and their son.
Paola Ferrante gratefully acknowledges the support of Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council.