Michael Meyer (travel writer)

Michael Meyer (Chinese: 梅英东), an American travel writer and the author of The Road to Sleeping Dragon: Learning China from the Ground up; In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China; and The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed. He graduated from University of Wisconsin–Madison. He first went to China in 1995 with the Peace Corps. Following Peace Corps, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied writing under Adam Hochschild and Maxine Hong Kingston.

His work has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Smithsonian, the New York Times Book Review, the Financial Times, Reader’s Digest, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Iowa Review, and on This American Life.

In China, he has represented the National Geographic Society’s Center for Sustainable Destinations, training China’s UNESCO World Heritage Site managers in preservation practices.[1]

He divides his year between London and Pittsburgh, where he is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, teaching nonfiction writing.[2] He is an avid long distance runner.[3]

After a five-year clearance delay, his book The Last Days of Old Beijing was published in mainland China.[4]