Paola Ferrante is an award-winning poet and writer living with depression.

Her debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her latest poetry chapbook is The Dark Unwind. Her short story, “When Foxes Die Electric,” was longlisted for the Journey Prize, and 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.” Other awards include Room’s prize for Fiction, and Grain’s Short Grain Prize for Poetry. She also won The New Quarterly’s 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, Best Canadian Poetry, The Master’s Review Anthology, North American Review, PRISM International, and elsewhere.

Her first short fiction collection, Her Body Among Animals, released this fall. The book is a genre-bending debut collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi, where women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called it a “decadent and haunting fiction debut”, adding “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.”

Paola is the Poetry Editor at Minola Review and lives in Toronto, Canada with her spouse Mat, and their son.

Appearing in 20. Folklore, Fable, and Fantastical Females