Michael Charles Carolan was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He received writing prizes from the Atlantic Monthly, the Virginia Press Association, the New England Newspaper and Press Association and San Francisco’s Crossroads Irish American Festival. His work has been named “Notable” in the Best American Essays series and has appeared in publications like the Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post, Santa Fe New Mexican, Kansas City Star, Nashville Review and the Massachusetts Review. He was a Heritage Writers Workshop Fellow in Fiction at George Mason University. His audio essays appear on New England Public Radio. Michael graduated from the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas-Lawrence and the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He worked in Washington, D.C., environmental and health journalism and for the National Institutes of Health and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. He has taught writing at Marlboro College, the University of Hartford and Smith College. He is a Professor of Practice at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.