Michael Patrick McDonald

Michael Patrick MacDonald is the New York Times Bestselling author of the memoir All Souls: A Family Story From Southieand Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots & Rebellion. He has been awarded an American Book Award, a New England Literary Lights Award, and fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study Center, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi, and Blue Mountain Center. 

As an activist he has focused efforts on cross-cultural coalition building to reduce violence, founding Gun Buyback programs and local support groups which gave voice to survivors of violence and the drug trade from across Boston's once-divided neighborhoods. 

He currently lives in Brooklyn New York, is Author in Residence in the Honors Department at Northeastern University, and Visiting Lecturer in the History Department at California State University, Northridge, where he teaches Writing & Social Justice Issues as well as a History of the North of Ireland. He is a contributor to the Boston Globe's Op Ed page and Esquire Online, and a frequent public speaker on issues of race, class, and violence. 

McDonald as an Irish American, is fiercely proud of his Irish roots and also his Boston heritage.