Michael Capuzzo is one of the country’s most honored writers. A native of Boston, his six books include two critically acclaimed New York Times nonfiction bestsellers, Close to Shore and The Murder Room.  His books and articles have been nominated six times for the Pulitzer Prize, twice for the National Book Award, and for the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Among more than 100 journalism awards, Mike is a winner of the National Headliner Award and was a finalist for the Livingston Award and for the Gold Dagger Award for best nonfiction book of the year from the British Crime Writer's Association in London. His books are international bestsellers and his stories have been widely anthologized. 

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Mike was a newspaper reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald,  covering everything from hurricanes to the trials of the last Unconquered Seminole Medicine Man in the Everglades, has written for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, and was an award-winning United Feature Syndicate humor columnist for Newsday and forty other newspapers. His magazine stories have appeared in Smithsonian, Esquire, Life, Sports Illustrated, and Reader's Digest. He helped produce a special episode of ABC's 20/20 about his book The Murder Room that helped solve the cold murder of a 15-year-old girl, and his books have been widely optioned by leading Hollywood studios.

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Mike started his journalism career at age 15, writing fifty stories for weekly and daily newspapers while still at Westwood (MA) High School, and revived and led the high school newspaper The Sacred Cheese to wide recognition as one of the finest in New England. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1979. His book Close to Shore, the true story of the 1916 shark attacks that inspired Jaws, was a People magazine "Top Ten" book of the year  hailed as an "adventure classic" with "artistry reminiscent of Stephen Crane" by The New Yorker and as the best book ever written on shark attack by The New York Times. The Murder Room featuring "the living Sherlock Holmes" was compared to crime and mystery classics by David Simon and Raymond Chandler, is taught in forensic colleges, and is in development for a weekly TV series.

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Mike is married to Teresa Banik Capuzzo, a former James Beard-nominated food writer for Philadelphia magazine and a Philadelphia Inquirer investigative researcher assisting Pulitzer Prize-winning teams. In 2004, Mike and Teresa moved to her mountain hometown of Wellsboro, PA (pop. 3,233), and Mike turned down an offer to move to Washington, D.C. and write "The Katrina Report" for the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to start a magazine with Teresa in their creekside house, Mountain Home, "Free as the Wind." Bucking the common wisdom that people no longer had time to read, their business plan was to publish true and often long narrative stories hewing to William Faulkner's dictum that a writer should leave "no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed..."  The magazine  grew to 100,000 readers in New York and Pennsylvania, has won more than 120 state and international awards for writing, photography,  design, and earned the couple recognition as two of the world's visionary magazine publishers by Professor Samir (Mr. Magazine) Husni at the University of Mississippi Innovation Center.

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In 2011 Mike went back to get an MFA in nonfiction writing from Goucher College, and has taught at Western Connecticut State University and lectured at many colleges including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Maryland, Rutgers, and Coastal Carolina, where Close to Shore was the freshman "Big Read."

 

Mike speaks widely and has appeared often on NPR, including Talk of the Nation, Weekend Edition, and Fresh Air, NBC's Today show, CNN, Fox, ABC Good Morning America, the CBS Evening News, and on dozens of radio stations across the country.  He has two globe-trotting daughters, Grace Capuzzo and Julia Capuzzo; he and Teresa live in a mountain home where they conduct the business of Beagle Media LLC with a cyclone of a Beagle mix, Nano.

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