Michael McColly’s essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Review, The Chicago Tribune, The Sun Magazine, the online blog Humans & Nature, and other journals. He is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning memoir, The After-Death Room: Journey into Spiritual Activism (Soft Skull Press), which chronicles his journey reporting on AIDS activism in Africa, Asia and America. Recently, his essays on walking have been anthologized in Belt Publishing’s series on the cities of Gary, Indiana and Indianapolis.

McColly has also published The World Is Round, a collection of college student essays that reflect on the experience immigrating to America. Along with a former student and photographer, Tuong Nguyen, McColly has written and produced a documentary on efforts by social workers in Vietnam who’ve worked with street youth affected by addiction and infected with HIV/AIDS. McColly has won a Lisagor Journalism Award for a 4 part series on WBEZ Chicago on Chicago neighborhoods, an Illinois Arts Council award for Prose, Pen America grants, and fellowships from Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, Ragdale and MacDowell Colony.

McColly holds a BA degree in Theater and History from Indiana University, an MA in Religious Studies from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. He has been a lecturer in Creative Nonfiction in Northwestern’s Master’s Program in Creative Writing, at Columbia College, and Loyola University. He was teaching creative writing to inmates in Indiana’s State Prisons before Covid 19. He is a former Peace Corp Volunteer, serving in Senegal.

Forthcoming from NorthernIllinois/Cornell Press, McColly's newest work, The Road is Made By Walking: 63 Miles Along the Divided Coast of Chicago, takes the reader on a lengthy urban walk that awakens new forms of awareness and reveals the divides of his hometown of Chicago. Step by step, neighborhood by neighborhood, the city reveals itself. The Chicago that emerges offers uplifting encounters with nature’s tenacious fecundity but also brings the reader face to face with the all-too-visible scars inflicted by racial injustice. 63 Miles blends environmental reportage, natural history, and memoir. McColly offers an unflinching portrait of the divides he witnesses on his coastal pilgrimage from Evanston to the Indiana Dunes. From North Side to South Side and into the heavily industrialized corridor that stretches into Indiana, he asks readers to bear witness to the economic, environmental, and social realities of poisoned lives and landscapes beyond the parks and high-rises that define Chicago’s Loop. He also, along the way, honors the transformative power of walking as a spiritual practice and a form of witnessing.