Michael Don is the author of the story collection Partners and Strangers (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2019). His work has appeared in journals such as Washington Square Review, Southern Humanities Review, Fiction International, Vol 1. Brooklyn, and The Southampton Review. He co-edits Kikwetu: A Journal of East African Literature and teaches in the English Department at Penn State University. Previously, he taught at St. Paul’s University in Nairobi, Kenya, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.

“Michael Don’s characters have all passed a brink, and now must live through the strange new lives they’ve made for themselves. Divorced, angry, lovesick, criminally impulsive—these insightful and endearing stories simmer with discontent and anxiety, humor and heart. Stitched together with concisely poetic prose, this wonderfully twisted batch of love stories rushes forward even as its characters stagnate, fester, and regress.”

—Baird Harper, author of Red Light Run

“Michael Don’s fiction creeps with the uncanny, occasionally winding into dangerous territory. Filled with both oddball humor and impossible tenderness, these stories are at once familiar and completely unexpected.”

—Laura Adamczyk, author of Hardly Children

“There is a deep and insightful wit hiding behind every line, in every story, of Michael Don’s fine debut collection, Partners and Strangers. Don is a sage guide, whirling us through a tour of his imagination, each stop a new, exciting, and welcome twist. Reading this collection makes me feel good: about literature, about the world.”

—Michael Czyzniejewski, author of I Will Love You for the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories