Mike Alberti grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Minnesota.
His debut collection of short stories, Some People Let You Down, was awarde the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Short Fiction in 2020. His stories have appeared in Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Florida Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, One Story, and elsewhere. His stories have won the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize from Hunger Mountain, and the Sweet Corn Prize from Flyway. His story, “Prairie Fire, 1899,” originally published in One Story, received a special mention in the 2018 Pushcart Prize Anthology and was included in New Stories from the Midwest 2018, edited by Antonya Nelson.
Mike has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Camargo Foundation, the James Merrill House, the Jentel Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the MacDowell Colony. He was awarded a Bread Loaf Fiction Scholarship in 2019.
He lives in Minneapolis, where he works as the Executive Director for Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.