Michael Leahy (author)

Leahy was born in Newark, New Jersey. At age 10, he moved with his family to a suburb of Los Angeles, California. He is a graduate of Yale University.

A feature writer known for his intimate portraits of subjects, Leahy explores topics varying from politics to social issues to sports. He has written for The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and his work has appeared in Washington Post Magazine, TV Guide, Playboy Magazine and Sports Illustrated.

Leahy has published three non-fiction books: Hard Lessons (1988), When Nothing Else Matters (2004) and The Last Innocents (2016).

Along the way, Leahy has covered presidential politics, rural poverty, obesity in the Southern United States, malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, the housecleaner dubbed fisherman-savior of Elian Gonzalez, the United States Army’s recruiting efforts amid the specter of the Iraq war, corporate scandals, a nudist camp, his mother’s struggles with Alzheimer's, and the playing comeback of basketball legend Michael Jordan with the Washington Wizards.

The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turblent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers, Leahy's third non-fiction book, was published on May 10, 2016 by Harper Collins.

• His story on the life of a paroled child murderer spared execution in the early 1970s because of a Supreme Court decision that briefly rendered the death penalty unconstitutional won the Washington D.C. Society of Professional Journalists’ Best Feature Story award.
• In 2004, GQ Magazine named When Nothing Else Matters "the best sports book of the year"
• In 2006, his Washington Post Magazine story about a single mother from Massachusetts who took her two young children across the country to meet their father – a sperm donor known to the woman for years only as Donor 929 – won honors from the Society of Professional Journalists as the best magazine story in the country for that year.
• His sports work has been selected four times for The Best American Sports Writing anthologies, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, which annually features the 25 best sports stories in the nation.
• Leahy won the 2016 Casey Award for The Last Innocents.[5] The book was a nominee for the 2017 PEN/ESPN Award For Literary Sports Writing.
• The Last Innocents was nominated as a finalist for the 2017 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing.[6]

Leahy resides with his wife in a suburb of Washington D.C.

• Leahy, Michael. (1988a) Hard Lessons, Boston. Little, Brown and Company.
• Leahy, Michael. (2004a) When Nothing Else Matters, New York. Simon & Schuster.
• Cramer, Richard (editor). (2004a) The Best American Sports Writing, New York. Houghton Mifflin Company.
• Leahy, Michael. (2016a) Last Innocents, The, New York. Harper Collins.

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