Lowell Lecture
Michael Patrick MacDonald, author of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie
Date & Time
Sept. 13, 2016 at 6 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.
Location
Boston Public Library - Rabb Lecture Hall
700 Boylston Street Boston, MA 02116
Driving Directions
Speaker(s)
Michael Patrick MacDonald
Presenting Organization
Topics
Contact
Programs (programs@bpl.org, 617.859.2382)
Michael Patrick MacDonald is the author of the New York Times Bestselling memoir, All Souls: A Family Story From Southie and the acclaimed Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion. These two books are frequent “First Year Experience” selections at colleges and universities throughout the U.S., for which MacDonald has given over 300 campus lectures. He has been awarded an American Book Award, A New England Literary Lights Award, and a fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center. MacDonald has written a number of essays and short stories, including "The Resurrection of Cornelius Larkin: An Immigrant’s Tale," written for The Dropkick Murphys' theme album “Going Out in Style.” He has been a regular contributor to The Boston Globe’s Op Ed page and a Senior Contributing Editor for the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.
MacDonald grew up in the Old Colony Housing Project in South Boston, a neighborhood that held the highest concentration of white poverty in the United States. After losing four of his eleven siblings and seeing his generation decimated by poverty, crime, addiction, and incarceration, he learned to transform personal and community trauma by becoming a leading Boston activist, organizer, and writer. MacDonald serves as Author-in-Residence at Northeastern University’s Honors Department, where he teaches his curricula: “Non-Fiction Writing & Social Justice Issues” and “The North of Ireland: Colonialism, Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Peace with Justice" every fall. He is currently developing his memoir All Souls as a TV series and is working on his third book, which will use narrative nonfiction storytelling to reveal issues of generational trauma in our local working class and poor communities.
This author talk is generously sponsored by the Lowell Institute, established in 1836 with the specific mission of making great ideas accessible to all people, free of charge.