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Michael Hemmingson has covered local homicides, bands, art, culture, and social issues for the Reader. He also publishes novels, short story collections, literary criticism, and edited anthologies, such as Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader, and The Mammoth Book of Legal Thrillers. His novel, The Rose of Heaven, set in Temecula, c. 1911, won the first San Diego Book Awards Association’s Novel-in-Progress Grant in 2000. The SDBAA also awarded him Best Published Novel of 2002 for Wild Turkey, a noir thriller that takes place in North Park and Las Vegas. His latest book is set for release in summer 2008: In the Background Is a Walled City, set in San Diego and Santa’s Castle in the North Pole.

Hemmingson is also an ethnographer, publishing both empirical and theoretical work in qualitative inquiry under the aegis of sociology, communications, and anthropology, with forthcoming books iBLOGGER: Symbolic Interaction, Digital Ethnography, and the Electronic Double in the Blogosphere and Auto/Ethnographies: Sex, Death and Independent Filmmaking in the Eighth Moment of Qualitative Inquiry. He is currently finishing two ethnographic studies of Tijuana, Zona Norte and Shadow Lives, and a social issues study of homelessness, Now I Know What Happened to Me.

His first feature film, The Watermelon, was released in fall 2008.