*Esquire* writer Mike Sager discusses *Revenge of the Donut Boys: True Stories of Lust, Fame, Survival and Multiple Personality*, in which he profiles bigger-than-life characters. Whether revealing Roseanne Barr's multiple-personality disorder or celebrating the life of a high school student on the edge of adulthood, Sager's narrative nonfiction can be compared to that of Sebastian Junger and Jonathan Krakauer. The Emory University graduate and former *Creative Loafing* intern has been called "the beat poet of American journalism: that rare reporter who can make literature out of shabby reality."
Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter. He's been called "the Beat poet" of American journalism. For more than a decade he has worked as a Writer-at-Large for *Esquire* magazine. Sager's career in journalism began in 1978, when he quit law school after three weeks to take a job on the graveyard shift as a copy boy at *The Washington Post*. Eleven months later, he was promoted to staff writer by Metro Editor Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame. Sager left the Post after six years to pursue a career in magazines. His first collection of articles, *Scary Monsters and Super Freaks*, published in 2003, was a *Los Angeles Times* bestseller, as was his second, *Revenge of the Donut Boys*, published in 2007. His first novel, *Deviant Behavior*, was published by Grove/Atlantic's Black Cat in April, 2008. A third collection, *Wounded Warriors*, was published in October, 2008 and received the Military Writers Society of America Founder's Award and the American Author's Association Golden Quill Award. A former Contributing Editor of *Rolling Stone* and Writer-at-Large for *GQ*, Sager has also written for *Vibe*, *Spy*, *Interview*, *Playboy*, *Washingtonian* and *Regardies*. He was recently named Editor-at-Large for *WordsETC*, the first black-owned literary magazine of South Africa. For his stories, Sager has lived with a crack gang in Los Angeles; ex-pat Vietnam veterans in Thailand; a 625 pound man in El Monte,CA; teenage pitbull fighters in the Philadelphia barrio; Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; heroin addicts on the Lower East Side; Aryan Nations troopers in Idaho; U.S. Marines at Camp Pendleton; Tupperware saleswomen in suburban Maryland; high school boys in Orange County. Eight of his articles have been optioned for or have inspired Hollywood films. Sager has read and lectured at the schools of journalism at Columbia University, NYU, Northwestern, the University of Illinois, and the University of Missouri, and at various other forums; his work is included in textbooks presently in use in college classrooms. Each spring, he leads a popular writing workshop for Literary Journalism majors at the University of California-Irvine, where he is a Pereira Visiting Writer. Fifty-two years old, Sager is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Emory University, and a former intern at the pioneering Atlanta alt-weekly Creative Loafing.