Best-selling author and award-winning reporter, Michael Wallis is a historian and biographer of the American West with an international reputation as a speaker and voice talent. It has been said, “reading a Michael Wallis book is like dancing to a romantic ballad. He offers his hand and gently guides you across the floor, swaying to the song of the American West.”

Wallis has published nearly two dozen books, including Route 66: The Mother Road, Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride, and The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Festiny.

His work has also been published in national and international magazines and newspapers, such as Time, Life, People, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.

Wallis has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize and was a nominee for the National Book Award. Other honors include: the Will Rogers Spirit Award, the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall & Western Heritage Museum, the Oklahoma Book Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book, and the Best Western Non-fiction Award from the Western Writers of America.

Wallis has been inducted into the Writers Hall of Fame of America, the Oklahoma Professional Writer’s Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame, and the Oklahoma Route 66 Hall of Fame. He received the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the Lynn Riggs Award and the first John Steinbeck Award.

In 2006, Wallis’s distinctive voice was heard in CARS, an animated feature film from Pixar Studios.

Wallis is also a member of the Oklahoma Route 66 Centennial Commission and the U.S. Route 66 Centennial Commission. He is also a co-founder of the Route 66 Alliance.

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