Mike Lala is a poet and performance writer living in New York City. He's the author of The Unreal City (Tupelo Press, 2023), Exit Theater (Colorado Prize for Poetry, 2016), and a number of chapbooks, including Points of Return (2023) and In the Gun Cabinet (2016). Poems appear in A Public Space, American Poetry Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, 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 works for installation and performance 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 of New York City, National Sawdust, New Ohio Theatre, Pioneer Works, The Poetry Project at St. Mark's, The Tank NYC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.