Mark McDonald is a veteran foreign correspondent, educator and novelist. He has worked for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, Dallas Morning News, Boston Globe and Knight Ridder Newspapers. In addition to foreign postings in Paris, Moscow, Hanoi, Seoul and Hong Kong, he has reported from more than 100 countries, including a dozen combat theaters and disaster zones.

Mark served as  the Howard R. Marsh Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan from 2005-2007, and his first novel, Off the X, based on his reporting from Iraq, was published in the autumn of 2015. At the IHT and The New York Times he won several Publisher’s Awards, Human Rights Press awards, and he shared the Asia Society’s 2009 Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism. He held the Knight Fellowship in International Business as a Michigan Journalism Fellow. While at the Dallas Morning News he worked on a team that went on to win the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting — a series on global violence against women.  Mark’s sports journalism, foreign reporting and essays have appeared in a number of nonfiction books, including most recently Eddy van Wessel’s prize-winning memoir on war photography, The Edge of Civilization.

Born in Washington, D.C., and a political science graduate of Kalamazoo College, Mark did post-grad work at Columbia University (history), New York University (fine arts) and the Monterey Language Institute (Vietnamese). He stays busy these days migrating between his homes in New Mexico, Texas and Mexico.