In Running With Ghosts, author Matt Tullis reminds us that surviving childhood cancer can be a challenge as formidable as fighting for your life—and more enduring. The eldest of three sons born to a trucker and an office-worker, who lived in the idyllic village of Apple Creek, Ohio, Tullis was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at age 15. In short order, the sports-mad teenager found himself on the cancer ward of Akron Children’s Hospital. One of the lucky ones, he walked out and kept on going.

Years later, as a journalist and college professor, Tullis began to wonder about all the friends and caregivers he’d left behind on 4-North. As his curiosity intensified, he decided to seek them out. Running With Ghosts is about friendship, loss, triumph, and closure: one man’s effort to understand more fully a life shaped by a random mutation in the code of his DNA.

“In his unflinching memoir of sickness and salvation, reporter Matt Tullis tells the story of his coming of age through cancer. With equal parts grace and gravitas, he resurrects the people who helped him survive – but didn’t themselves.”

— Kim Cross, New York Times best-selling author of What Stands in a Storm

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Media Coverage

• Matt went and talked with sixth-graders at Reed Intermediate School in Newtown (his daughter’s class) about memoir writing, and the Newtown Bee did a nice story.

• Matt did a guest lecture and a reading at the Bowers Writers House at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, and the student newspaper, the Etownian, wrote this story.

• The Newtown Bee wrote a wonderful feature about Matt and Running With Ghosts leading up to his reading at the C.H. Booth Library in Newtown.

• News@Fairfield had this piece online today about the upcoming reading and book talk at the Fairfield University bookstore.

• Matt wrote this piece for Fairfield University’s blog, ThinkSpace. It’s focused on the writing of Running With Ghosts.

• News 12 in Norwalk, CT, did this package on the book on Sept. 25. Earlier in the day, they aired this segment earlier.

• Cleveland.com stopped by the Running With Ghosts table at the Akron Marathon Expo and did nice, short story.

• The Akron Beacon Journal and Ohio.com ran a story (Running to Remember) about Matt and other patients who have been named Heroes for the upcoming Akron Marathon.

• The Daily Record (Matt’s first full-time newspaper gig!) and the Ashland Times-Gazette (where Matt first covered high school football) ran “Running With Ghosts: Tullis’s memoir Recalls his Childhood Fight With Cancer.”

• The Bargain Hunter, a weekly newspaper in Holmes County, published this nice piece on Matt and Running With Ghosts.

• Matt was a guest on Gangrey: The Podcast, talking about the book. Matt has hosted 53 episodes of the podcast. This is the first time he was a guest.

• Cleveland Magazine called Running With Ghosts “an unflinching memoir with an air of documentary reality and emotional self-reflection.” Read the magazine’s Q&A with Matt Tullis here.

• You can listen to Matt talk about the book with Brendan O’Meara on the Creative Nonfiction Podcast by clicking here.