The Rest of the Story: Transforming Trauma to Voice, Agency, and Leadership
Michael Patrick MacDonald
Michael Patrick MacDonald is the author of the New York Times bestseller All Souls: A Family Story from Southie and the acclaimed memoir Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion.
MacDonald grew up in the Old Colony Housing Project in South Boston, a neighborhood that once held the highest concentration of white poverty in the United States. After losing four of his eleven siblings and witnessing his generation decimated by poverty, crime, addiction, and incarceration, he moved beyond the entrenched borders of his community toward solidarity and coalition-building with Boston’s Black and brown survivors and organizers. In those communities, he learned the power of grassroots organizing and storytelling to transform personal and collective trauma into voice and agency, and brought that work back home to “Southie,” building multiracial working-class led movements.
He currently teaches restorative and transformative justice at Harvard and Northeastern University and is working on a third book which will use storytelling to explore how people heal from atrocity through narrative reclamation and community building.
Mr. MacDonald's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Open Academy at CMC.