Bill Brett/Globe Photo
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. Both are frequent selections for Campus Reads and First-Year Experience programs at high schools and universities throughout the U.S. He has been a guest speaker at over 300 campuses.
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 wandered beyond the entrenched borders of his community toward solidarity and coalition-building with Boston’s Black and brown survivors and organizers. It was in those communities that he learned the power of grassroots organizing to transform personal and collective trauma to voice and agency, becoming a leading Boston activist, organizer, and writer. He co-founded Boston’s first-ever Gun Buyback programs and local support groups for survivors of poverty, violence, suicide, and the drug trade. His efforts have built class-conscious multi-racial coalitions to reduce violence and promote leadership from among the families and communities most impacted.
At Northeastern University’s Honors Department, MacDonald teaches Non-Fiction Writing & Social Justice Issues. He leads an annual Northeastern University "Dialogue of Civilizations" classroom to Derry and Belfast, Northern Ireland, where students witness post-Troubles efforts happening at the intersection of justice and healing. At Harvard University Summer School, MacDonald teaches Storytelling and Global Justice which is about the role of personal narrative in local and global Restorative and Transformative Justice movements.
Macdonald has developed a community-based trauma-informed storytelling curriculum, The Rest of the Story: Transforming Trauma to Voice, Agency, and Leadership. The program was piloted in 2014 at Crittenton Women’s Union (now EMPath) with Boston women moving toward economic independence. Since 2015, it has been continually implemented with survivors of homicide victims at the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute; in Ireland with cross-border “men’s sheds” and at Loughan House Prison; with Participation and Practice of Rights in the North of Ireland where it is building a coalition of mental health advocates to confront a post-conflict suicide and painkilling epidemic; with Massachusetts parents forming a Family Advisory Committee to the Department of Youth Services; and, most recently, with youth-leaders of Dublin’s Northeast Inner City Coalition, a community dealing with high poverty, recent gang wars, and high substance use death rates.
MacDonald was awarded a 2019 Fulbright Scholarship to the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens University Belfast, which he used to develop a transatlantic Boston-to-Belfast, "Black and Green" storytelling coalition with intergenerational survivors of loss to homicide, state killings, and painkilling epidemics. A mutual aid, grassroots mental health model, the project is operating with the goal of using storytelling to promote and sustain leadership from among those most impacted by social injustice and to build Global, multi-racial, working class activist connections.
He is currently working on a third book which uses his trademark storytelling style to reveal issues of generational trauma and painkilling epidemics, and the role of reclaimed personal narratives in building movements for justice and healing.
To book Michael Patrick MacDonald for Speaking Engagements, contact American Program Bureau.