Michael Pearson

Michael Pearson has written six books – a novel re-imagining the story of the real-life Huck Finn, Shohola Falls (2003), and five books of nonfiction – Imagined Places: Journeys into Literary America (1991), A Place That’s Known: Essays (1994), John McPhee (1997), and Dreaming of Columbus: A Boyhood in the Bronx (1999). His most recent book, published in 2008, is Innocents Abroad Too: Journeys Around the World on Semester at Sea. In it, he recounts two circumnavigations of the globe on ships with college students.


For ten years, from 1997-2006, he directed the graduate program in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Now he is a professor in that program, teaching courses in travel writing, narrative nonfiction, and American literature.


He has published articles, stories, and essays in many magazines, journals, and newspapers – The Southern Quarterly, The Southern Literary Journal, The Literary Review, The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, and The Washington Post, among many others.


For Pearson, travel and writing have always been intimately connected, allowing experience and the imagination to nurture one other. In a sense, all true writing is travel writing, a stepping beyond the boundaries of the known into a jeopardy-filled, thrilling new world. All genuine writing is such an adventure, an attempt to find the ever-elusive place in the world we can call home.


Contact Michael Pearson at mpearson@​odu.edu.