Michelle Beaver serves as the editorial director of a national medical magazine, and community teaching artist
for Arizona State University's Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. She's a 2024 Flinn-Brown fellow, has reported for the Associated Press and Bay Area News Group and has won national journalism awards. For 20 years Michelle has freelanced for publications such as Los Angeles Review of Books, PHOENIX Magazine, The Oakland Tribune, The Mercury News, the USA Today Network, Echo Magazine, etc. She’s also served as editor in chief of five national healthcare magazines that have been nominated for or won several Folio awards.
Michelle is the founder of the Arizona chapter of PEN America. PEN, founded in 1922, works at the intersection of literature and human rights to promote free expression in the United States and worldwide, and includes members such as Salman Rushdie, Barbara Kingsolver and Toni Morrison. Michelle plans and hosts statewide PEN events, including esteemed speakers such as politicians and best-selling authors.
She's an agented author, writing a health book for John Wiley & Sons and ghost-writing a health book for Reader’s Digest. A book she independently published ranked first on Amazon’s list of gay-and-lesbian nonfiction and was the focus of a National Public Radio program. She has edited many fiction and nonfiction books and served as a judge for Fiction500, the Arizona Authors Association, and the TABBIE awards. Her forthcoming novel, Cypher Crew, tells the story of five misfits who unite through hip-hop street dance to save Arizona’s oldest high school from the very people who should be protecting it.
Michelle’s journalistic passion started at age 15 when she led a statewide battle against censorship that included drafting and presenting senate bill 1282 with Democratic Senator Joe Eddie Lopez. The measure
lost but did not quell her belief in what youth can achieve. Over the last two decades she’s volunteered weekly for groups that help disadvantaged teens including: The City of Oakland Parks and Recreation Department (California), Boys Hope Girls Hope (Phoenix), The Louis August Jonas Foundation (Manhattan and Denmark), Cyphers: The Center for Urban Arts (Phoenix), and Shine Together (California).
Michelle taught journalism at Arizona State University and Scottsdale Community College and has served on nonprofit committees and boards. She’s the mother of cats and a human child.