Michael Wallis
A best-selling author and award-winning reporter, Michael is a historian and biographer of the American West who also has gained international notoriety as a speaker and voice talent. In 2006 Michael’s distinctive voice was heard in CARS, an animated feature film from Pixar Studios, also featuring Paul Newman, Bonnie Hunt, Owen Wilson, Michael Keaton, and George Carlin. Michael will be featured in CARS 2, a sequel to the original motion picture due for release in 2011.
A storyteller who likes nothing better than transporting audiences across time and space, Michael has published fifteen books, including Route 66: The Mother Road, the book credited with sparking the resurgence of interest in the highway. In 2007, Michael’s latest works, Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride and The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate, were published by W.W. Norton. Michael’s biography of David Crockett, entitled David Crockett: The Lion of the West, will be published in the spring of 2011, and his seventeenth book, The Wild West: 365 Days, also will be published by Abrams this year.
Other Wallis books include The Real Wild West: The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West; Mankiller: A Chief and Her People; Way Down Yonder In The Indian Nation; and Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd. His work has been published in hundreds of national and international magazines and newspapers, including Time, Life, People, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.
Michael has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize and was also a nominee for the National Book Award. He has won many other prestigious honors, such as the Will Rogers Spirit Award, the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall & Western Heritage Museum, the Oklahoma Book Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book, and the Best Western Non-fiction Award from the Western Writers of America.
Michael was inducted into the Writers Hall of Fame of America, the Oklahoma Professional Writer’s Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame, the Tulsa Hall of Fame, and was the first inductee into the Oklahoma Route 66 Hall of Fame. He received the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book as well as the Lynn Riggs Award and the first John Steinbeck Award.
Since 1982, Michael and his wife, Suzanne Fitzgerald Wallis, have made their home in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Updated bio:
NYT bestseller author Michael Wallis is a historian and biographer of the American West, and is a truly engaging speaker and voice talent. In 2006 and 2011, Michael’s distinctive voice was heard in CARS and CARS 2, animated feature films from Pixar Studios.
A storyteller who likes nothing better than transporting audiences across time and space, Michael has published over fifteen books including: The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny, The Real Wild West, Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride, and The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate.
Michael has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, and has also been a finalist for the National Book Award. He has won many other prestigious honors, such as the Will Rogers Spirit Award, the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall & Western Heritage Museum, the Oklahoma Book Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book, and the Best Western Non-fiction Award from the Western Writers of America.
Michael was inducted into the Writers Hall of Fame of America, the Oklahoma Professional Writer’s Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame, the Tulsa Hall of Fame, and was the first inductee into the Oklahoma Route 66 Hall of Fame. He received the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book as well as the Lynn Riggs Award and the first John Steinbeck Award.
For more about Michael and his works, go to http://www.michaelwallis.com/
