Michelle Syba is the author of End Times (Freehand Books, 2023), a story collection about people variously entangled with evangelical culture. A finalist for the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize, End Times features an expansive cast that includes a hipster megachurch pastor, a management consultant having a nervous breakdown at Davos, as well as some Slavic immigrants and some elderly folks.
Michelle is curious not only about people’s relationships with religious faith—including losing or despising it—but also about immigrant families, single parents, mushrooms, and the ways that literature captures people’s inner lives.
She teaches literature and creative writing at Dawson College, and previously taught in the Harvard College Writing Program.
Her stories have placed second in The New Quarterly’s annual fiction contest and been finalists for Glimmer Train’s New Writer award and for yolk‘s Montreal Fiction Prize. Her writing has also been published in outlets such as Cosmonauts Avenue, Image, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere, and been performed on CBC radio and at the Blue Met International Literary Festival.
