Selected Works

Listen to the podcast on Cornell University Press or Soundcloud Michael McColly's essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Boston Review, and The Sun magazine. He is the author of the Lambda Literary Award–winning memoir The After-Death Room, chronicling his journey reporting on AIDS activism in Africa, Asia, and the United States. We spoke to Michael about how your perception radically changes when you move through the world with intention, how his 63-mile journey th

What I learned from letting my legs walk me back to health. https://www.poz.com/article/healing-power-walking

Conversation with Frank Ring, Walker and Podcaster, on Walking Chicago's Coas t. Discussions focuses on the the healing powers of walking on the body and the mind.

Blending travelogue, memoir, and environmental reportage, Walking Chicago’s Coast takes readers on an urban journey. Michael McColly...

Op-ed in Chicago Tribune 8/23/25 on the social and environmental benefits of walking in cities.

Alone, on long walks, the memories still come to me, arising out of the streets of Chicago or along the pilgrim’s path of Santiago,...

Amid widespread indifference toward the most vulnerable, even small acts of kindness can make a difference. L ike her mother, who had...

From 71st St. to the Circle and back — walking Indy The promise and problems of Indy's 'Open Road' Last summer, I was sitting in what was...

“It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s...

Lying in my bed late into the night, if I hold my body still and concentrate, I can hear the waves of Lake Michigan. I wait for the El to...

We finally find her by the side of the road, standing in a clump of chalk-blue chicory, fingering yellow coneflowers, a few feet from a...

The day after my mother told him the news, he called. His voice cracked, and I could hear him trying to pick up his words and hand them...