Mike Spikes

Mike Spikes, 2018
Photo from the

Arkansas State University website

Mike Spikes (born Michael Paul Spikes, December 24, 1954, Indianola, Mississippi, U.S.A.), American academic, professor of English at Arkansas State University, literary critic and theorist, and poet. He has been publishing haiku since 1999 in journals that include Haiku Headlines, Black Bough, Piedmont Literary Review, Parnassus Literary Journal, Lilliput Review, Frogpond, Potpourri, Modern Haiku, Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Tundra, The Aurorean, and Acorn. In 2005 a haiku of his won the Museum of Haiku Literature Award in Frogpond; his work has twice (2010 and 2017) been included in the Red Moon Anthologies; and he has had a haiku included in Marlène Buitelaar’s anthology, The Scent of Music (2013), and another in Lee Gurga and Scott Metz’s compendium, Haiku 2016. Modern Haiku has published four, and Frogpond one, of Spikes’s theoretical articles, while a number of his essays on literary theory and criticism, as well as his lyric poetry, have appeared in mainstream journals. A book, Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory, was published in 1997 and revised in 2003. Mike Spikes resides in Jonesboro, Arkansas.


Note: This is an abstract of a longer biographical article to come.

Updated on September 25, 2022