Michele Turk

Michele Turk has worked as a freelance journalist and editor for fifteen years, primarily covering women’s health issues for consumer magazines and web sites. Turk recently published her first book, Blood, Sweat and Tears: An Oral History of the American Red Cross (2006).

Blood, Sweat and Tears tells the story of the modern-day Red Cross through the voices of twenty-nine current and former Red Cross paid staff and volunteers from all parts of the country. The book is the first narrative history of the Red Cross since the 1950s, and was published to coincide with the organization’s 125th anniversary in 2006. One dollar from the sale of each book will benefit the Southeastern Mississippi and Southeast Louisiana chapters of the American Red Cross, which were hard-hit by Hurricane Katrina.

Stories range from that of a World War II veteran who credits the Red Cross packages with keeping him alive when he was a POW in Germany to Americans who became heroes simply because they signed up for a Red Cross course and were later able to save a life, to volunteers who spent an intense year in Vietnam cheering up soldiers. Profiles also include a mother who saved a neighbor’s child when he was drowning, a nurse who took off from her job to distribute food and supplies to the victims of the Asian tsunami in 2004 and a Red Cross worker whose home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Before she became a writer, Turk worked in the non-profit sector. She spent one year as a counselor in a homeless shelter in Los Angeles as part of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a full-time volunteer program for recent college graduates. Her involvement with the Red Cross began in 1987, when she worked as a disaster specialist for the American Red Cross in Greater New York, coordinating volunteers to work on local and large-scale disasters. After Hurricane Hugo hit the Caribbean in 1989, Turk spent a month in Puerto Rico and St. Croix working on disaster relief efforts.

Turk has been on the scene of several other major disasters. While she was working as an assistant editor at American Health magazine in New York, Turk arrived on the scene within a week of the Northridge earthquake in 1994 to write a feature on the psychological impact of the disaster. In the late 1990s, she covered news and features pertaining to national disasters as a staff writer for a Red Cross/CNN/IBM web site (www.disasterrelief.org). In the fall of 2001, Turk went to ground zero to report and write articles on a volunteer basis for a Red Cross web site. She has also written articles about the September 11th attacks for BusinessWeek.

Turk is a graduate of Boston College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.