Claremore Daily Progress

Entertainment

June 27, 2008

Wallis to speak at Memorial

Award winning author and voice of “Sheriff” in the Disney-Pixar movie “Cars” will be speaking on the endangered Route 66 Motels in Oklahoma at 10 a.m. July 12, at the Will Rogers Memorial.

This program is free and open to the public and is part of the Oklahoma’s Most Endangered Historic Places Program, a joint project of the Oklahoma State Historic Preservation Office and Preservation Oklahoma.

Michael Wallis is a historian and biographer of the American West.

A best-selling author and award-winning reporter, Wallis has written ten best sellers, including “Route 66: The Mother Road”, “The Real Wild West: The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West,” and “Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd.” Wallis has been thrice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and was also nominated for the National Book Award. He has won several other prestigious awards and honors, including the Oklahoma Center for the Book Lifetime Achievement Award Winner in 1999.

Michael Wallis has been a writer since l968. Wallis's work has been published in national and international magazines and newspapers, including Time, Life, People, Smithsonian, Texas Monthly, and The New York Times. He is a contributing editor for Oklahoma Today.

Born in Missouri in 1945, Michael was educated at Western Military Academy and attended the University of Missouri at Columbia. He completed graduate English and history studies at Southeast Missouri State University and at the University of Arizona branch in Guadalajara, Mexico. During his early years as a writer, he held a variety of jobs, including bartender, hotel waiter, social worker, printer, and ranch hand. He also served with the Marine Corps and was honorably discharged as a sergeant.

Wallis moved to Miami, Florida, in 1978 where he spent twenty-one months working as a special correspondent in Time's Caribbean Bureau. He covered the Cuban refugee exodus, crime and drug smuggling, and major news events for Time-Life News Service and also contributed to several other domestic and foreign publications.

Since 1982, Michael and his wife, Suzanne Fitzgerald Wallis, have made their home in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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