Michael A Kroll

A Finalist in the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Awards for his first novel, "Soul of the Matter", Michael A. Kroll is an award-winning journalist and story teller, specializing in issues of justice and injustice. Selected for "Special Recognitio" by the Eugene Block Journalism Awards for "outstanding coverage of human rights issues," Kroll draws on those issues in "Soul of the Matter".

Having grown up in the beautiful Ojai Valley in Southern California, Kroll attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in political science and graduating in 1965, a few months after being arrested in the Free Speech Movement. He taught in an all-Chinese secondary school in the jungles of Malaysian Borneo for the Peace Corps, and taught Adult Education in East Los Angeles, Honolulu, New Orleans, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Michael Kroll has fought against the death penalty and for criminal justice reform by working as a Mitigation Specialist in many death penalty cases, and heading such organizations as the National Moratorium on Prison Construction and the Death Penalty Information Center.

Michael has been published widely in newspapers from The New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, and in publications as disparate as The Nation and Progressive magazines on one hand, and Women's World on the other. He has had memoir pieces published, including "McCarthyism Goes Postal," (Ojai Quarterly, winter 2015-'16) and "Land Snakes Alive," (Trajectory Journal, Spring 2018). He has a published book-length memoir, "Beijing and Beyond", chronicling a 1981 tour of China's coming-of-age criminal justice system. These pieces, among others, can be found on his web page: www.michael-a-kroll.com.

Kroll leads writing workshops in juvenile halls, facilitates a memoir-writing group of seniors, and posts many of his published pieces on his website. In addition to writing, he also records as a Voice Over artist from his home studio in Oakland, California. (michaelsvoice.net).