Michael Patrick Pearson (born June 18, 1949) is an American author of six books — a novel, Shohola Falls (2003), and five works of non-fiction; Imagined Places: Journeys into Literary America (a New York Times Notable Book of 1991), A Place That's Known: Essays (1994), John McPhee (1997), Dreaming of Columbus: A Boyhood in the Bronx (1999), Innocents Abroad Too: Journeys Around the World on Semester at Sea (2008), and Reading Life: On Books, Memory and Travel (2015).
For a decade, from 1997 to 2006, he directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
He currently teaches non-fiction writing and American literature at ODU.