Mike D'Orso earned both his undergraduate degree in philosophy and his master's degree in English from the College of William and Mary. He taught high school English and has been a staff writer for Commonwealth magazine. As a writer for the Virginian-Pilot Newspaper he won numerous national honors including the Penney-Missouri Prize for general feature writing and three Pulitzer Prize nominations. D'Orso's work has also appeared in publications such as Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Reader's Digest and People magazine. Additionally he has written a chapter on journalism research methods for The Complete Book of Feature Writing; and his writing on author Jack Kerouac has been included in both Studies in American Fiction and the QPB Literary Review. Mike D'Orso has also written 13 non-fiction books (see Bibliography). Included among those works is Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood, which was a New York Times best- seller, and American Library Association Notable Book of the Year, and winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award for writing on the subject of social justice. The Papers of Mike D'Orso housed in the Old Dominion University Special Collections consists of his notes, interview transcripts, research done while writing Like Judgement Day.

Note written by Special Collections Staff