Hello!

A bit about me

To paraphrase the Grateful Dead, it has been a long strange trip. So here are the highlights.

​Nothing in my background would lead me to be an author except my love of reading. As a friend said, I am probably one of the few people to ship a footlocker of books on an overseas deployment. No matter where I went, I brought books with me. 

​With a military career behind me, I entered academia and ended with a Ph.D. in political psychology and a job as a lecturer in security and international relations. I wasn’t really interested in research and concentrated on teaching, often punctuating my lectures with historical vignettes. I finally took the suggestion of some students and five years ago started to write.

​My first published story, “Home” was set in World War 2 and was based on the experience of a German refugee returning as part of the Army and ending up in his hometown on the day of Germany’s surrender. I toyed with a few other genres (literary, fantasy, romance) and had some success, but nothing was as much fun as writing historical fiction. So I have been focusing on bringing the past to life.

​As a student of World War 1, I try and bring my knowledge of history and experience as a soldier to my stories of the trenches. Recently, I have been working on a series of short stories about the war including this recent story in Sundial Magazine – The Burial Party (google.com)

​Eventually, I hope to write a novel on the  Royal Engineer’s tunneling companies during World War 1.

When weather and time permits I can be found bicycling the backroads of Boulder County.

Some of my published works (not including flash fiction which is available at https://spillwords.com/author/mikekanner/

• “Home” – You Belong – 2018
  A German immigrant returns to his homeland as a soldier in World War 2.
• “Romancing the Writer” – Rapture 2018
  What happens when a romance writer finds romance.
• “The Lake House” – Rise – 2019
  Sacrifice takes many forms.
• “Ifrit” – Tempest – 2019
  Sometimes salvation comes in the form of a demon.
• “Underground” – Solitude – 2020
  Buried alive in a collapsed trench, a soldier has to dig his way out through the bodies of his fellow soldiers.
• “White Feather” – Chiaroscuro – 2021
  Vice and virture are not always easy to separate.