About

Michael Janairo earned his undergraduate degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh.

The first book he remembers is the moving, action-packed, numerically loaded and physically improbable tale “Bears on Wheels.”

He currently works as the Assistant Director for Engagement at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, and for years worked as an arts journalist, covering such things as books, visual arts, classical music, theater, pop music, television, movies and social media. He’s won state and national awards for online content, print features sections, social media enterprise, web reporting and headline writing. He has been a fellow at the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., for the Big Ideas Conference (underwritten by the McCormick Foundation), and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, an artist colony in Amherst County, Virginia.

Though many point to his years as a delivery boy of the long-gone afternoon daily newspaper the Pittsburgh Press as the start of his career, he really got his start with an underground publication, TNT Magazine, which he co-edited until his co-editor’s father no longer let them use his mimeograph machine.

You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. Or email him at “michael (at) michaeljanairo.com”