Madeleine H. Blais

Memoirs, Journalism Literature, Nonfiction Writing

Professor

M.S., Columbia University

S429 Integrative Learning Center | 413-545-5924


Biography

Madeleine Blais, professor emeritus, earned a bachelor’s degree at the College of New Rochelle in 1969 and a master’s from the School of Journalism at Columbia University in 1970. She was a reporter for the Boston Globe, the Trenton Times and Tropic Magazine of the Miami Herald from 1979 to 1987. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing while at the Miami Herald. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in the class of 1986. She has written for the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Northeast Magazine in the Hartford Courant, Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, Nieman Reports, Detroit Free Press, Boston Globe and San Jose Mercury News. She is the author of In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (1995), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in nonfiction and named one of the Top 100 sports books of the 20th Century by ESPN; The Heart Is an Instrument; Portraits in Journalism (1992); and Uphill Walkers: Memoir of a Family (2001), honored with a Massachusetts Book Award. She is a member of the advisory board for Goucher College’s MFA program in creative nonfiction and she serves on the editorial boards of Riverteeth and Doubletake: Points of Entry.

Professor Blais retired from teaching full-time in 2018.