Michael Luo
Michael M. Luo is an American journalist currently serving as executive editor of The New Yorker and its website,. Previously, he wrote for The New York Times as an investigative reporter.
Early life and education
Luo was born into a Taiwanese American family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1976. His parents were waishengren who had fled mainland China during the Great Retreat. His father was raised in Tainan, Taiwan, and immigrated to the United States in 1967 to study for a doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of Chicago. Luo's mother came to the U.S. to earn a master's degree in accounting at Western Illinois University. His paternal grandfather was a Kuomintang general in the National Revolutionary Army who disappeared in 1948. Their ancestral home was in Hunan.Luo spent his early childhood in upstate New York, and then attended high school in Michigan. He graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in government in 1998. As an undergraduate at Harvard College, he wrote for ''The Harvard Crimson.''
Career
Luo was a staff writer for two years for the Associated Press, where he wrote narrative feature stories, while also working at Newsday as a police reporter on Long Island. Luo reported for the Los Angeles Times before moving to The New York Times. In 2002, Luo received a George Polk Award for Criminal Justice Reporting and a Livingston Award for Young Journalists "for a series of articles on three poor, African Americans in Alabama who were in prison for killing a baby that probably never existed." His story resulted in the release of two of the three prisoners, while the third remained in prison on a separate charge. In 2000, Luo won a T.W. Wang Award for Excellence for his journalism on Chinese-American topics.In September 2003, Luo joined the metropolitan desk The New York Times. According to the Times, Luo "has written about economics and the recession as a national correspondent; covered the 2008 presidential campaign and the 2010 midterm elections; and done stints in Washington and in the Baghdad bureau." Luo wrote a piece in October 2016 that went viral about a woman who accosted him on the street for being a Chinese American.
Luo went on to edit investigations at The New Yorker, and was eventually promoted to manage the magazine's entire digital presence.
On April 29, 2025, Luo released a debut nonfiction book, Strangers in the Land, about the history of the Chinese in America.