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Michael McColly’s essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Review, The Chicago Tribune, The Sun Magazine, the online blog Humans & Nature, and other journals. He is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning memoir, The After-Death Room: Journey into Spiritual Activism (Soft Skull Press), which chronicles his journey reporting on AIDS activism in Africa, Asia and America. Recently, his essays on walking through the cities of Gary, Indiana and Indianapolis have been anthologized in Belt Publishing’s series on Midwestern cities.
McColly has also published The World Is Round, a collection of college student essays that reflect on their experience immigrating to America. Along with a former student and photographer, Tuong Nguyen, McColly has written and produced a documentary on efforts by social workers in Vietnam who have worked with street youth affected by addiction and infected with HIV/AIDS.
McColly’s forthcoming book, Walking Chicago's Coast: A 63-Mile Journey to the Indiana Dunes (Northern Illinois/Cornell University Press) takes readers on a long-distance, urban walk across Chicago’s metropolis. The Chicago that emerges in this hybrid work of creative nonfiction offers encounters with nature’s tenacious fecundity but also brings the reader face to face with the all-too-visible scars inflicted by environmental and racial injustice. McColly offers an unflinching portrait of the divides he witnesses on this coastal pilgrimage through Chicago’s neighborhoods to Indiana’s Dunes National Park.
McColly has won a Lisagor Journalism Award for a 4-part series on WBEZ Chicago on Chicago neighborhoods. He also has been awarded an Illinois Arts Council award for Prose and received fellowships from Blue Mountain Center, MacDowell, Ragdale and Yaddo
McColly holds a BA degree in Theater and History from Indiana University, an MA in Religious Studies from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. In the early 1980’s he served in the Peace Corps, living and working in a rural Wolof farming community in Senegal.
He has been a lecturer in Creative Nonfiction in Northwestern’s School of Professional Studies and their graduate Program in Creative Writing. He’s also taught creative writing at Columbia College and Loyola University Chicago. Before Covid 19, he was teaching creative writing in Indiana’s State Prisons.