Michael Fischer is a non-fiction writer, storyteller, and senior manager at Jobs for the Future’s Center for Justice & Economic Advancement, where he helps support robust postsecondary education in prison programming and fair chance hiring ecosystems for people returning from incarceration. He has also conducted writing and storytelling workshops for various organizations, including AIDS Foundation Chicago.
Michael is a fellow of Right of Return USA, Illinois Humanities Envisioning Justice, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, and the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts. His writing — which has won the National Systems-Impacted Writers’ Contest, been cited as notable in Best American Essays, and been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, among other honors — appears in The New York Times, Salon, The Sun, Lit Hub, Guernica, Orion, The Rumpus, Brevity, River Teeth, and elsewhere.
A Moth StorySLAM winner, Michael tells stories on Moth Mainstages across the US and abroad and has been featured on Modern Love: The Podcast, Ear Hustle, the Outside Magazine Podcast, and The Moth Radio Hour, among other programs. His work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Art for Justice Fund, Aspen Institute, and Ragdale Foundation, among others. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Reno and a master’s degree in humanities from the University of Chicago, where he was awarded a Grauman Fellowship.
