Edward (Ted) McClelland is a native of Lansing, Michigan, also the birthplace of Burt Reynolds and the Oldsmobile. After getting his start in journalism at the Lansing Community College Lookout, Ted went on to the Chicago Reader, where he met Barack Obama during his failed 2000 campaign for Congress. Ted's coverage of that race became the basis of Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President. His book The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes. Nothin' But Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times and Hopes of America's Industrial Heartland (Bloomsbury Press, 2013) is a history of the Rust Belt, inspired by seeing the Fisher Body plant across the street from his old high school torn down where he ran track.

Ted's book How to Speak Midwestern is a guide to the speech and sayings of Middle America. His most recent book, Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class, is about the 1936-37 Flint Sit Down Strike, which led to the establishment of the United Auto Workers as the nation's preeminent labor union. Ted's writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Salon, Slate, and Playboy. RUNNING FOR HOME is his first novel.