Paola Ferrante is a writer living with depression. Her debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack (2019), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Prize. She has won Grain Magazine's Short Grain Contest for Poetry, The New Quarterly's Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, Room Magazine's Fiction Contest, and was longlisted for the 2020 Journey Prize for the story “When Foxes Die Electric.” Her work appears in After Realism: 24 Stories for the 21st Century (2022), Best Canadian Poetry 2021 (2021), North American Review, PRISM International, and elsewhere. She was born, and still resides in, Toronto.

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"Paola Ferrante comes out of the gate as one of the strongest new writers in Canada. In What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack, the perversions of procedural thinking are exposed in a mock-scientific deconstruction of man's attempted dominion over women. Classic horror films, biology, fairy tale motifs, and subtle biography, weave together in a dance that is grotesque and revealing in the best possible way. This collection will not make you comfortable. It will leave you gaping, nodding your head, dumbfounded both by the brutality of its truth and by the intoxicating craft of its author." --Robin Richardson