Michael Pearson teaches creative writing and American literature at Old Dominion University. He has published essays and stories in the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Southern Literary Journal, the Shenandoah Review, and Creative Nonfiction, among many others. He is the author of five nonfiction books—Imagined Places: Journeys into Literary America (listed as a notable book in 1991 by the New York Times Book Review), A Place That’s Known: Essays (1994), John McPhee (1997), Dreaming of Columbus: A Boyhood in the Bronx (1999) and, most recently, Innocents Abroad Too (2008), which recounts two journeys around the world by ship on the Semester at Sea program. Pearson has also written a novel, Shohola Falls (2003), a coming-of-age narrative that imagines the hidden life of Mark Twain and the journal of Thomas Blankenship, the real-life Huck Finn. Willie Morris, the former editor of Harper’s said, “Michael Pearson is one of our nation’s finest memoirists.”
Michael Pearson teaches creative writing and American literature at Old Dominion University. He has published essays and stories in the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Southern Literary Journal, the Shenandoah Review, and Creative Nonfiction, among many others. He is the author of five nonfiction books—Imagined Places: Journeys into Literary America (listed as a notable book in 1991 by the New York Times Book Review), A Place That’s Known: Essays (1994), John McPhee (1997), Dreaming of Columbus: A Boyhood in the Bronx (1999) and, most recently, Innocents Abroad Too (2008), which recounts two journeys around the world by ship on the Semester at Sea program. Pearson has also written a novel, Shohola Falls (2003), a coming-of-age narrative that imagines the hidden life of Mark Twain and the journal of Thomas Blankenship, the real-life Huck Finn. Willie Morris, the former editor of Harper’s said, “Michael Pearson is one of our nation’s finest memoirists.”
