Walking Chicago's Coast: A 63 Mile Journey to the Indiana Dunes
Photo by Michael McColly
Join the Humboldt Park Branch for an author talk with Michael McColly, author of Walking Chicago's Coast!
Walking Chicago's Coast is part memoir, part travel narrative, part environmental reportage, McColly sews together this metropolis as he walks, reflecting on the city's layers of history and its troubling divides as well as muses on his years living in this grand polyglot mecca of the Midwest. In the end, McColly's walk is a form of advocacy in that he asks us to witness where we live from the ground, so that we can cherish and revere the multiple histories—human and nonhuman--that shape our cities, our lives, and our planetary future.
Michael McColly 's essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Sun Magazine, The Boston Review, Marsh Hawk Press, Chicago Review, and other journals. His essays have appeared in Not Like the Rest of Us , an anthology of Contemporary Indiana Writers, The Gary Anthology, and The Indianapolis Anthology . He is the author of the 2006 Lambda Literary Award-winning memoir, The After-Death Room: Journey into Spiritual Activism which chronicles his journey reporting on AIDS activism in Africa, Asia and America.
His newest work, Walking Chicago’s Coast: A 63-Mile Journey to the Indiana Dunes , chronicles an improbable pilgrimage from his doorstep across the metropolis of Chicago. Blending memoir, travelogue, and environmental reportage, he reflects on the city’s history, its stark inequalities, its natural wonder, and on the transformative benefits of walking where we live.
McColly has won a Lisagor Journalism Award for his series on Immigrants in Chicago for WBEZ, an Illinois Arts Council award for Prose, Pen America grants, and fellowships from Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, Ragdale, and MacDowell Colony.
He has been a lecturer in Creative Nonfiction in Northwestern University’s Master’s Program in Creative Writing and at Columbia College. He also has taught…
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Join the Humboldt Park Branch for an author talk with Michael McColly, author of Walking Chicago's Coast!
Walking Chicago's Coast is part memoir, part travel narrative, part environmental reportage, McColly sews together this metropolis as he walks, reflecting on the city's layers of history and its troubling divides as well as muses on his years living in this grand polyglot mecca of the Midwest. In the end, McColly's walk is a form of advocacy in that he asks us to witness where we live from the ground, so that we can cherish and revere the multiple histories—human and nonhuman--that shape our cities, our lives, and our planetary future.
Michael McColly 's essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Sun Magazine, The Boston Review, Marsh Hawk Press, Chicago Review, and other journals. His essays have appeared in Not Like the Rest of Us , an anthology of Contemporary Indiana Writers, The Gary Anthology, and The Indianapolis Anthology . He is the author of the 2006 Lambda Literary Award-winning memoir, The After-Death Room: Journey into Spiritual Activism which chronicles his journey reporting on AIDS activism in Africa, Asia and America.
His newest work, Walking Chicago’s Coast: A 63-Mile Journey to the Indiana Dunes , chronicles an improbable pilgrimage from his doorstep across the metropolis of Chicago. Blending memoir, travelogue, and environmental reportage, he reflects on the city’s history, its stark inequalities, its natural wonder, and on the transformative benefits of walking where we live.
McColly has won a Lisagor Journalism Award for his series on Immigrants in Chicago for WBEZ, an Illinois Arts Council award for Prose, Pen America grants, and fellowships from Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, Ragdale, and MacDowell Colony.
He has been a lecturer in Creative Nonfiction in Northwestern University’s Master’s Program in Creative Writing and at Columbia College. He also has taught…
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