Freethought Matters: Michelle Dowd

Michelle Dowd is a journalism professor at Chaffey College in southern California. She’s a contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Book Review, and other national publications. She’s been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and profiled on the second season of “Sincerely X,” a TED production. Her popular “Modern Love” column in The New York Times is what led to the publication of her new book, “Forager: Field Notes on Surviving a Family Cult.”

Dowd was raised on an isolated mountain in the Angeles National Forest as a member of a family cult, where she learned wilderness survival for the coming apocalypse preached by her grandfather.

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