Storytelling and Global Justice

Michael Patrick 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. He received a 2019 Fulbright Scholar Award, teaching Transformative Storytelling at Queen's University, Belfast and bringing his community-based writing and storytelling curriculum to grassroots organizations dealing with post-conflict generational trauma. 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 grew up in the Old Colony Housing Project in South Boston, a neighborhood that at the time held the highest concentration of white poverty in the US. 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 a leading Boston activist, organizer, and writer. His efforts have built diverse, class-conscious mutual aid coalitions to reduce violence by addressing root causes and promote grassroots leadership from within the communities and families most impacted. He co-founded Boston's first gun buyback program, as well as local support groups for survivors of poverty, violence, and the drug trade. At Northeastern University's Honors Department, MacDonald serves as Writer in Residence and Professor of the Practice. The theme of most of his work is the intersection of justice and healing. MacDonald is a frequent guest lecturer at universities, including University of Massachusetts Honors College, where he served as Distinguished Writer in Residence in 2015. He also currently teaches at the Harvard Extension School and Harvard Summer School. Macdonald has developed a community-based writing and healing curriculum, "The Rest of the Story: Transforming Trauma to Voice and Agency."