Michael Pearson

Michael Patrick Pearson (born June 18, 1949) is an American author of hundreds of essays and eight books – a novel, Shohola Falls, and seven works of non-fiction; Imagined Places: Journeys into Literary America (a New York Times Notable Book of 1992), A Place That's Known: Essays (1994), John McPhee (1997), Dreaming of Columbus: A Boyhood in the Bronx (1999), Innocents Abroad Too: Journeys Around the World on Semester at Sea (2008), Reading Life: On Books, Memory and Travel (2015), The Road to Dungannon: Journeys in Literary Ireland (2023). His new nonfiction book—The Road to Croagh Patrick: One Writer's Literary and Spiritual Pilgrimages—will come out from McFarland and Company in 2026.

Early life Pearson was born and grew up in the Bronx. He went to St. Philip Neri Elementary School, Mount St. Michael High School, and Fordham University. In 1971, after he married Jo-Ellen Kiernan and they moved to California, he received a master's degree from the University of San Francisco. For two years (1972–1974), he taught in a Bronx junior high school. From 1974 to 1977, he studied at the Pennsylvania State University, where he received his doctorate in English and American literature.

He then taught at Auburn University in Alabama, LaGrange College in Georgia, and for 32 years at Old Dominion University in Virginia. From 1997 to 2006, he directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He is currently a full-time writer, working on both nonfiction and fiction projects.