Michael Luo

Luo was born into a Taiwanese American family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1976.^[4][5] His parents were waishengren who had fled mainland China during the Great Retreat .^[6] 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.^[7]

Luo spent his early childhood in upstate New York, and then attended high school in Michigan.^[8] 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.^[9]

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.^[3][4] Luo reported for the Los Angeles Times before moving to The New York Times.^[3] 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, [disabled] African Americans in Alabama who were in prison for killing a baby that probably never existed."^[3] His story resulted in the release of two of the three prisoners, while the third remained in prison on a separate charge.^[3] In 2000, Luo won a T.W. Wang Award for Excellence for his journalism on Chinese-American topics.^[4]

In September 2003, Luo joined the metropolitan desk The New York Times.^[3][4] 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."^[3] Luo wrote a piece in October 2016 that went viral about a woman who accosted him on the street for being a Chinese American.^[10]

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.^[11]

Luo resides on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with his wife, Wenny. They have two daughters, Madeleine and Vivienne.^[12]