WALKING CHICAGO'S COAST: A 63-MILE JOURNEY to the INDIANA DUNES
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
Author
Michael is the author of The After-Death Room (Soft Skull Press), for which he won a Lambda Award in 2007 for best spiritual memoir, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Review, Chicago Review, The Sun, and other literary journals.
Michael has won a Lisagor Journalism Award, 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 in Indiana’s State Prisons.
He holds degrees from Indiana University, The Divinity School at The University of Chicago (Religious Studies), and University of Washington (Creative Writing). He is a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal.
David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
“Michael McColly, in his beautiful new book, adds something new to the walking/thinking/essaying gesture: genuine feeling. Walking Chicago's Coast is a rhapsody of grief and appreciation."
Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination
"McColly shows us the glories and flaws of a great city, its economic and racial divisions, and its devastated outskirts. He also shows us people working to mend communities and restore degraded lands."
Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
“McColly's improbable pilgrimage along Chicago's coast testifies to walking's transformative powers. This is a work of great wisdom, tenderness, and defiance destined to be a classic of urban literature.”
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