Michael Hickins is a novelist, memoirist and journalist. His most recent book is The Silk Factory: Finding Threads of My Family’s True Holocaust Story. His influential short story collection The Actual Adventures of Michael Missing (Alfred A. Knopf) has been used as course material in MFA programs. Other works include the novels Blomqvist and The What Do You Know Contest, and the memoir I Lived in France and So Can You (Dzanc). Hickins was born in Queens, New York, and has plied his trade with The Wall Street Journal, eWeek, Women’s Wear Daily and Oracle. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University School of the Arts, and was a McDowell Colony residency grantee. He lives with his wife and son in the deep dark woods of Westchester County, New York, USA.

Hickins is senior director of communications for Oracle Corporation. Prior to that, he was the founding editor and editor-in-chief of CIO Journal, digital editor at The Wall Street Journal, and editor for several trade publications, including Women’s Wear Daily. He has published widely on technology and business issues at Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc., and Fast Company. Hickins lived in France for a dozen years, coaching French baseball teams, translating legal and technical documents into English, and co-founding a successful American restaurant, Molly’s Lone Star.

He earned his BA in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia College, Columbia University, and earned an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University School of the Arts.

Hickins has two adult children, both born in France (where one still resides), and a baseball-playing 7-year-old son with his third wife. He has and always will love the New York Yankees.

Advance Praise for The Silk Factory: Finding Threads of My Family’s True Holocaust Story

• The Silk Factory is a terrific read, a Holocaust book unlike any other.
– Sam Apple, author of Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection

• Michael Hickins’ memoir is an unforgettable exploration of personal and intergenerational history—the traumas we inherit, the stories we tell ourselves and our children, and the stories that are hidden, even as they shape our lives.
– Dawn Raffel, author of Boundless as the Sky

• A wonderful, deeply illuminating book to savor.
– Alice LaPlante, New York Times bestselling author of Turn of Mind

• A powerful and unflinching personal quest as Hickins bravely attempts to untangle the legacy of generational trauma.
– Victoria Redel, author of Paradise

Reviews for The Actual Adventures of Michael Missing:

• “Outrageously inventive.” – The Literary Journal
• “Meditative and powerful” – The Hartford Courant
• “Wise and wryly funny” – People Magazine
• “Bizarre and sometimes baffling picaresque tales. [Hickins’] flip tone, gratuitous sex and violence… snide stories resemble underground comics” — Publishers Weekly

Reviews for Blomqvist

“Incredibly well-written historical fiction” — Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

“Tremendously done” – Bryn Hammond, Goodreads

Other Accomplishments:

– The Actual Adventures of Michael Missing has been used as course material at the Columbia University School of the Arts Writing Program

– Recipient of McDowell Colony residency grant

– Won a Codie Award for SECPlus, the first digital SEC compliance tool on the web, as the editorial lead at Thomson Reuters;

– Speaker and panelist at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in 2013 and 2014