Author's Biography

Mike Ball is an award-winning humorist and author of What I've Learned So Far... who lives and writes on the shores of Whitmore Lake, Michigan, sharing a roof with his wife Nancy and a psychotic Siamese cat. Their home is just North of Ann Arbor, a town that includes around 50,000 University of Michigan students, 62,595 student-staffed restaurants, and an undetermined number of one-way streets.

In addition to cranking out his weekly humor column, Mike is the founder of Lost Voices, a Michigan non-profit group that takes therapeutic roots music writing and performing programs to incarcerated and at-risk youth.

As President and Creative Director of a small creative production company The Advertising Group, Mike spent 28 years writing and producing columns, ads, brochures, slogans, songs, menus, and anything else that needed writing, including a eulogy for a dog.

During the Internet Boom of the 1990s he wrote a monthly humor column for an information technology-oriented human resources magazine (now there’s a combination that just screams humor!) called Itrecruitermag. These pieces covered such topics as "What To Do When You Run Into Your Boss At The Career Fair" and "So, You’ve Been Downsized. Sucks To Be You.

Away from the keyboard, Mike had a lot of experience as a youth hockey coach. This includes two years as the head coach of the Saline, MI High School hockey team, during which time he discovered that you can actually see the cloud of testosterone in a high school hockey locker room.

Mike also spent some time as a competitive pairs water skier. This is a sport similar to pairs figure skating, only with less Russian Mafia involvement. He and various partners have won numerous awards, including the 1997 Florida State Show Ski Championship at Cypress Gardens, the 2000 Indoor World Championship, the 2002 Michigan State Expert Division Championship and the 2002 Division II National Championship.

In 2003 Mike won the Erma Bombeck Award for a column called Just A Little Bike.

What I’ve Learned So Far... is syndicated by North Star Writers' Group and has online readers in eleven countries (that we know of).