Michael Lesy is a writer and professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. His books, which combine historical photographs with his own writing, include Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), Time Frames: The Meaning of Family Pictures (1980), Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life (1982), Visible Light (1985), Dreamland: America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (1997) , (with Angelo Rizzuto) Angel's World: The New York Photographs of Angelo Rizzuto (2005), and Murder City (2007).
Lesy grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio and studied at Columbia University, The University of Wisconsin and Rutgers University, where he attained a doctorate in American cultural history.[1] He has taught at Hampshire College since 1990 and is professor of literary journalism. In 2006 he was named a United States Artists Fellow.[2]
Wisconsin Death Trip was adapted into a film by James Marsh in 1999.[3][4]
Visible Light gave one-chapter biographies of four contemporary photographers. The chapter on Angelo Rizzuto presented a persuasive theory suggesting how an artist's individual style (and styles in art) develops and is as fascinating an explanation of art theory as Kubler's "The Shape of Time." The chapter on Andrea Kovacs describes the effect Buddhist (Nichiren Shoshu) meditation has on an individual's life and art.
Lesy has also proven to be one of the most inspiring professors in the Five Colleges (Massachusetts) community of Hampshire County, Massachusetts. His students produce remarkable works and write ground-breaking literature of their own;[5] his classroom model facilitates collective thought, unattainable in a lecture format. His courses on literary journalism and photographic narrative facilitate latent and historical storytelling, more on the order of extended literature research (i.e. book-writing) than traditional newspaper publication.[6][7]