Marrianne Micros

MARIANNE MICROS, associate professor (retired), was born in the small town of Cuba, New York, where her family owned an ice cream factory. She is proud of her Greek heritage and has travelled many times to Greece, renewing her family ties and her conversational Greek language. Marianne earned degrees at Sweet Briar College, St. Bonaventure University, and The University of Western Ontario. She moved to Canada in 1974 for Ph.D. studies, got married here, and never left. At the University of Guelph, she taught Early Modern literature – and was especially interested in Medieval and Early Modern women writers. She also taught creative writing, folktales, and Scottish literature. She is an active writer of both poetry and fiction. Her story collection Eye (Guernica, 2018), which explores mythology, folklore, and Greek customs, was one of five finalists for the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and was also shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award in 2018. In 2023 she published the story collection Statue (Guernica, 2023), a collection of short fiction which includes stories of supernatural encounters of humans with such entities as the devil, a ghost, a selkie, and a goblin. Her suite of poems Demeter’s Daughters was shortlisted for the Gwendolyn MacEwen poetry competition in 2015 and published in Exile: The Literary Quarterly. Her previous publications include: a book of poetry about her Greek family, Upstairs Over the Ice Cream (1979); a poetry collection that focusses primarily on her search for ancestors and family members in Greece, Seventeen Trees (2007); and poems and short fiction in anthologies and journals. She has published scholarly articles on Renaissance and contemporary subjects and a bibliographical monograph on Al Purdy (1980). She has also presented papers on representations of dance in Early Modern literature. After some forty-five years of teaching, Marianne has now retired from her career as an English professor at the University of Guelph, where she worked for thirty years. She is currently writing a book of stories about an uber-driving medium, while studying mediumship herself. Marianne also spends time enjoying her grandchildren, reading mysteries, and bellydancing.