About Mark
After graduating from Harvard College, Mark Jonathan Harris started his professional career covering crime from five in the afternoon to two in the morning for the famed City News Bureau of Chicago, where novelist Kurt Vonnegut and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Sy Hersh also got their start. Within a year, he moved to reporting national news for the Associated Press and then to making television documentaries for the King Broadcasting Co. stations in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington.
Harris’s award-winning early films document some of the most important political issues of the 60s. Huelga! is a portrait of Cesar Chavez’s United Farmworkers Union and the first year of the union’s historic Delano grape strike. The Redwoods, which won an Academy Award for Best Short Documentary, presents the Sierra Club’s successful case for establishing a Redwoods National Park. The Foreigners explores the work of a group of Peace Corps volunteers confronting the contradictions of U.S. foreign policy as they try to bring about social change in Colombia.
In 1973, Harris and his family moved to Los Angeles where he returned to print journalism while continuing to make films. For several years a contributing editor to New West magazine, he also wrote articles, essays, and reviews in a number of national newspapers and magazines including TV Guide, American Heritage, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. During this period he also began writing fiction and published five award-winning novels for children.
Since then, Harris has alternated fiction, journalism, and filmmaking. Two films he wrote and directed that explore the Holocaust won Oscars for Best Feature Documentary. The Long Way Home documents what happened to the survivors of the concentration camps in the period immediately following their liberation. Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport chronicles Britain’s rescue mission of 10,000 children in the nine months prior to World War II. The U.S. Library of Congress selected the documentary for permanent preservation in the National Film Registry. Harris also wrote Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives, which was nominated for an Emmy for a Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming. Other of his notable films: Darfur Now, which he produced, was nominated for best documentary of the year by the National Board of Review and the Broadcast Film Critics Association; Breaking Point: The War for Democracy in Ukraine, which he co-wrote and co-directed, won multiple international awards; Foster, which he also wrote and directed, was nominated for best documentary screenplay by the Writers Guild of America; and he was a consulting producer for the 5-part, Peabody Award-winning series Asian Americans.
For 40 years, he taught filmmaking at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, where he was a Distinguished Professor. In 2010, the International Documentary Association honored him for his educational work with its Scholarship and Preservation Award.
Misfits, a collection of his short stories, was published in 2023.
Watch the interviews and podcasts below
*click here for more on mgopod.com
About the book
How do you connect with others when you always feel out of place?
Following a kaleidoscopic array of characters adrift in a precarious world, Misfits grapples with the challenges of contemporary life, including climate change, inequality, uncertainty, and pain.
A depressed accountant stumbles on a teenage eco-terrorist in a parking garage; a middle-aged psychiatrist buys a drink for a seductive young artist during a flight delay; an out-of-work journalist recruits Chicano gangbangers to help a desperate tennis partner; a troubled biologist runs into J. Robert Oppenheimer in a Santa Fe hotel.
These fraught encounters all have unexpected and startling consequences. Despite their differences in age, background, and circumstance, the characters in Misfits share a common sense of dislocation and alienation. They struggle to find a sense of belonging and connection, but ultimately discover unexpected sources of resilience and hope.
With its evocative portrayal of Los Angeles as a microcosm of contemporary society, Misfits offers a compelling exploration of the human condition in an unpredictable and rapidly changing world.
"Misfits is a startling collection of short stories -- heartfelt, compassionate, full of sentiment yet unsentimental. Mark Harris draws on his experiences as a crime reporter, professor, filmmaker and novelist to weave a dazzling portrait of modern life that I can only compare to the works of Raymond Carver and Anton Chekhov. Personal, political, full of pathos, insightful, Misfits delves deeply into the American psyche. Read and prepare to think differently about where we live and the "misfits" who populate contemporary America."
Have a question you'd like to ask?
Fill out the form below, and I'll be in touch with you soon