Michael Eric Dyson Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of New York Public Library Lectures in Humanities Books

Michael Eric Dyson
Michael Eric Dyson was born October 23, 1958 in Detroit, Michigan. He is an American academic, ordained minister, bestselling author, and radio host.

He is the son of Addie Mae Leonard, who was from Alabama, and was adopted by Everett Dyson, his stepdad. He went to Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan on an academic scholarship however he left and finished his education at Northwestern High School. At the age of nineteen, Michael became an ordained minister.

After he worked in factories in Detroit to support his family, he went to Knoxville College as a freshman at the age of twenty-one. He got his bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, from Carson-Newman College in the year 1985. In 1993 he got his PhD in religion from Princeton University after he finished a doctoral dissertation called “Uses of Heroes: Celebration and Criticism in the Interpretation of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

Michael has taught at Chicago Theological Seminary, DePaul University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Brown University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

From 2007 until 2020, he was a Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. In the year 2021, he moved to Vanderbilt University where he holds the Centennial Chair and serves as the University Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies in the College of Arts and Science and University Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society in the Divinity School. Between 2016 and 2018, he was a visiting professor at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Dyson also is a radio host, hosting a show that aired on Radio One, from January of 2006 until February the next year. Michael’s also been a commentator on MSNBC, National Public Radio, and CNN and has been a regular guest on Real Time with Bill Maher. Starting in July of 2011, he became a political analyst for MSNBC.

He also hosted The Michael Eric Dyson Show radio program that debuted on April 6, 2009, and was broadcast from Morgan State University. Oprah Winfrey was the first guest of the show. The final episode of the show aired in December of 2011.

Michael served on the board of directors of the Common Ground Foundation, which is a project dedicated to empowering urban youth in the United States. Dyson and Marcia, his wife, were regular speakers and guests at the Aspen Institute Conferences and Ideas Festival. He hosted a television show called The Raw Word.

He has won two NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work—Non Fiction for “Why I Love Black Women” and “Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?” He’s also won the American Book Award for “Come Hell or High Water”, and the Southern Book Prize for “Tears We Cannot Stop”.

Michael’s been married three times, from 1977 until 1979, again from 1982 until 1992 to Brenda Joyce. That same year, he married Marcia Louise. He has a son, named Michael Eric Dyson II, with his first wife, Theresa Taylor, and two daughters (Mwata and Maisha) and has three grandchildren.

“Tears We Cannot Stop” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2017. Emotional, literary, short, and powerful. This is the book that every American that cares about the long burning and current crisis in race relations is going to want to read.

While the country wrestles with racist division at a level that hasn’t been seen since the sixties, a single solitary man’s voice soars well above the rest with compassion and conviction. In his New York Times op-ed from 2016, called “Death in Black and White”, Michael moved an entire nation.

Now he continues to speak out in this book, which is a deeply personal and provocative personal call for change. He argues that if we are to make some real racial progress we have to face some tough truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been discounted, ignored, or even dismissed.

This book is one of the most searing and frank discussions on race, and it is an urgent and deeply serious book. It is an elegantly written and powerful book, with its moving personal recollections, guidance for moral redemption, and profound cultural analysis. This is a work to relish.

“Long Time Coming” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2020. A passionate call to America to reckon with race and begin the journey to redemption.

America was changed the night of May 25, 2020. George Floyd, a 43 year old Black man, was murdered during an arrest in Minneapolis when a white police officer suffocated him. Video of this night’s events wound up going viral, sparking some of the largest protests in the entire history of the nation, and the type of social unrest we’ve not seen since the sixties. Floyd’s death may have been the catalyst, heightened by the fact that it happened during a pandemic and whose victims were disproportionately of color, it was in truth the fuse that lit an ever filling powder keg.

This book grapples with the social and cultural forces which have shaped this nation in the savage crucible of race. In five gorgeously argued chapters, each one addressed to a black martyr from Rev. Clementa Pinckney to Breonna Taylor, Dyson traces the genealogy of anti-blackness from the slave ships to the street corner that Floyd lost his life on. Which is where America gained its will to face the ugly truths about systemic racism.

This exciting new book, which ends with a poignant plea for hope, points the way to social redemption, and is a necessary guide to help America reckon with race at last.

The book is powerfully illuminating, enlightening, and heart wrenching, and is an unfiltered Marlboro of black pain. Michael’s got a lot to offer on our nation’s vital need for racial reckoning and the way forward. He also does a fantastic job of instilling in readers the need to hear two or even more sides of a certain story. It can be difficult to read in parts due to its raw emotion in each chapter, but it’s well worth it.