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Michael Patrick 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, becoming an activist, organizer and writer. MacDonald has focused his community efforts on diverse, class-conscious coalition building to reduce violence and promote grassroots leadership from our most impacted communities and families. He co-founded Boston's first Gun Buyback programs and local support groups to promote the voices of adult and youth survivors of poverty, violence and the drug trade.
MacDonald is the author of the New York Times Bestselling memoir, All Souls: A Family Story From Southie and 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 he 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 is working on his third book, The Echoes, which will use narrative non-fiction storytelling to reveal issues of generational trauma & painkilling in working class and poor communities. In addition, he has developed a community-based writing and healing curriculum, The Rest of the Story, which was piloted with the Crittenton Women’s Union in Boston to help women who are transitioning out of poverty find their voices on the page and in the world. This year he has taken transformational storytelling to Boston survivors of homicide victims at The Louis D Brown Peace Institute, some of whom are with us as special guests this evening.
MacDonald has been a contributor to The Boston Globe’s Op Ed page and a Senior Contributing Editor for the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University for work on the 40th Anniversary of desegregation/Busing in Boston.
At Northeastern University’s Honors Department, he serves as Professor of the Practice, teaching his curricula: “Non-Fiction Writing & Social Justice Issues” and “The North of Ireland: Colonialism, Armed Resistance and the Ongoing Struggle for Peace with Justice." From May 8th - June 8th, he will lead a Northeastern University "Dialogue of Civilizations" classroom from Boston’s neighborhoods to post-conflict Derry & Belfast, in the North of Ireland. The name of the Dialog is “Redemption Songs: The Role of Our Lived Stories in Restorative and Transformative Justice.” As with all of his past activism, writing and teaching, the theme of the dialog will be the intersection of justice and healing.
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