Micah McCrary
English doctoral candidate Micah McCrary’s debut memoir, Island in the City, has been accepted for publication by University of Nebraska Press.
McCrary’s primary area of study is rhetoric and composition, though he has a secondary specialization in creative writing (nonfiction). His memoir grows out of his work as a Master of Fine Arts student at Columbia College Chicago.
“The book started out as my MFA thesis, and while I was writing it I got a lot of help from faculty and classmates about how to envision everything coming together,” McCrary says.
“After graduation I just started revising it in bits and then, when I felt like I couldn’t look at it anymore, I started sending it out to editors with crossed fingers,” he adds.
McCrary’s diligence has paid off substantially: Island in the City, a memoir that explores place, gender, race, and home, will be released in September 2018.
Publisher’s Abstract: What forges the unique human personality? In Island in the City, Micah McCrary, taking his genetic inheritance as immutable, considers the role geography has played in shaping who he is. Place often leaves indelible marks: the badges of self-discovery; the scars from adversity and hardship; the gilded stamps from personal triumphs; the tattoos of memory; and the new appendages—friendships, experiences, and baggage—we carry with us. Each place, with its own personality, has the power to form or revise our personhood in surprising and fascinating ways.
McCrary considers three places he has called home (Normal, Illinois; Chicago; and Prague) and reflects on how these surroundings have shaped him. His sharp-eyed, charming memoir-in-essays contemplates how aspects of his identity, such as being black, male, middle-class, queer, and American, have developed and been influenced by where he hangs his hat.
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