About

Mike Lala grew up in the western United States and Tokyo, and lives in New York.

He is the author of The Unreal City (Tupelo Press, 2023), Exit Theater (Colorado Prize for Poetry, 2016), and the chapbooks Twenty-Four Exits: A Closet Drama, In the Gun Cabinet, and Points of Return. Poems appear in A Public Space, American Poetry Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, New American Writing, the PEN Poetry Series, and Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula, and he is a contributing translator to Tales of Dionysus (University of Michigan Press, 2022).

Lala’s installations, performance, and libretti include Whale Fall (2021), Madeleines: Tell Me What It Was Like (2020, with Iris McCloughan), Oedipus in the District (2018–19), and Infinite Odyssey (2018). He has presented work at the 92nd Street Y (for Anne Carson's Tenth Muse), The Knitting Factory, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Sawdust, New Ohio Theatre, Pioneer Works, The Poetry Project at St. Mark's, The Tank NYC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Lala holds an MFA from NYU, where he was a Veterans Writing Workshop Fellow.

C.V.

Contact: lalamichael@gmail.com