Michael D'Orso | Official Site

ike D'Orso's work includes sixteen books, all in the form of narrative nonfiction. His subjects range from politics to professional football, from racial conflict to environmental destruction, from inner-city public education to social justice to spinal cord injury. The settings for his books range from Arctic Alaska to the Galapagos Islands to the swamps of rural Florida.

Honors for Mike's work include the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the New York Times Notable Book of the Year list, Newsweek Magazine's 2009 list of "50 Books For Our Times," the American Library Association's Alex Award, the Lillian Smith Book Award for writing on social justice, the Christopher Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the American Library Association's Nonfiction Book of the Year, selection among the New York Public Library's "25 Best Books of the Year", and inclusion three times in The Sporting News' annual Best Sports Stories anthology. Eight of Mike's books have been bestsellers. Three have been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His newspaper work as a feature writer at the Virginian-Pilot was also nominated three times for a Pulitzer.

Mike's work has been featured or reviewed in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, Time, Newsweek, Forbes, Outside, Cosmopolitan, Audubon, Reader's Digest, Business Week, People, and The Oxford American magazines, as well as in numerous major metropolitan newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today. He has appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," C-Span's "Book TV," MSNBC and numerous National Public Radio programs, including Michael Feldman's "Whad'Ya Know?"

"Extraordinary, graced with the sure touch of a natural storyteller, the discipline of an investigative reporter, and the word craft of a novelist."
--The Los Angeles Times

"Mike D'Orso is a natural-born storyteller with a sure feel for the foibles of human nature. He doesn't varnish his characters, and in the process, he makes the reader care deeply about them."
--The Detroit Free Press

"Mike D'Orso is lucid. He is vivid. He is graceful. He is sensitive. He is full of facts. He is my idea of a wonderful feature writer."
--Howard Simons (former managing editor of The Washington Post)

"The author keeps track of a huge cast of characters and delineates each one with the insight of a serious novelist."
--The New Yorker

"His work is in the tradition of a Capote."
--The St. Petersburg Times