About Michael.
Michael is an award-winning writer, storytelling trainer, keynote speaker, and certified experiential coach. His work explores how storytelling can create change, make meaning, inspire action, cultivate connection, and transform division. He works with individuals, groups, and organizations around the world to find, craft, and tell their most meaningful stories.
He lives with his young son in Nashville, Tennessee on land once inhabited by the Shawnee, Cherokee, and Yuchi people.
Read the story of how it all began
I grew up in a very small town in Tennessee. My dad was a family doctor, and every March when I was kid, he spent a week hosting university students from Nashville who wanted to learn about health care in our small town. Mid-week, he gathered the students to share stories. I envied the students for hearing from my dad what I hadn’t yet. I dreamed of being among "the chosen." And at last, when I was thirteen, my dream came true.
Fifteen of us circled in the clinic’s waiting room, on weathered canvas seats, hot pizza beside my mom’s fresh chocolate cookies. I can still see the orange glow of the sunset cast across the dark carpet. I sat, with my feet on the floor like the “adults,” and listened as Dad shared two stories about encounters with patients. I’ve never forgotten them.
He told how he gave an ultrasound to a pregnant woman who revealed that her stomach scars were from when she was three, and her mother set her on fire. And the other about a woman seeking his help for her Xanax addiction who confessed her landlord was forcing her to pay the rent with sex. I remember my stomach churning, like I’d been kicked. These weren’t the kinds of stories I expected to hear. Then Dad challenged us, “Why tell such stories of suffering?” I honestly didn’t know, so I sat quietly, waiting. And then someone said: “Because how will we know how to act if we don’t know the story?”
I believe my dad wanted me to join that night so I’d learn that the world is filled with painful needs; that doing right by the world means attending to those needs; and to do that, we must encounter the stories. This value stuck with me—attending to the pain and need of the world. It sparked a passion that led me to study history, conflict resolution, and to devote my work to the healing possibility of peace through storytelling. Because my dad was right—the world’s pain needs our attention and action.
Today, I have the privilege of supporting people across the globe in the two areas that most enliven me: telling stories and navigating conflict.
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Michael McRay is a storyteller, teacher, and narrative guide for the brave and brokenhearted. A rebel poet with a therapist’s intuition, a preacher’s cadence, and a playwright’s soul, Michael weaves together narrative practice, psychodrama, and circle process to help people reckon with the stories that have shaped them—and reclaim the agency to shape what comes next. He walks the wild in-between—where story meets soul, and where healing begins in the telling.
To Michael, story isn’t just performance — it’s practice. It’s how we make meaning, how we metabolize pain, how we build bridges between worlds. His work lives at the intersection of narrative intelligence, trauma integration, community connection, and collective imagination. Through his ventures Becoming Restoried and the Istoria Institute, he teaches people and organizations how to become better stories—not just tell them.
Michael’s story work has reached around the globe and deep into the human heart. With over 20 years of travel to Israel and Palestine and a master’s in conflict resolution at Trinity College Dublin, Michael honed his passion for peace and his reverence for truth-telling. He’s sat in story circles in Belfast, Kigali, and Cape Town—and led them in boardrooms, prisons, and living rooms across the United States.
In 2013, he brought a bit of Belfast home and founded Tenx9 Nashville, now Nashville’s longest-running storytelling series. Over 11 years and 1,000+ true personal stories later, Michael is still hosting it—because he believes gathering to tell the truth might be one of the most sacred things we can do.
He’s the author of multiple books, including the award-winning book I Am Not Your Enemy, and the co-editor of Keep Watch With Me: An Advent Reader for Peacemakers. His work has been sought after by TEDx, NASA, Cisco, Accenture, and more—but his favorite audience is still his son Rowan, who reminds him daily what wonder sounds like.
This is Michael’s work: to walk with others into the dark forests of their stories and help them find the wild way through.
Bios for Event Use
Three SENTENCE BIO:
Michael McRay is a nationally recognized storytelling expert and trainer, sought-after experiential coach, and dynamic keynote speaker. He is an award-winning author and the Head of the Istoria Institute for Narrative Intelligence. You can learn more at www.michaelmcray.com and @michaeltmcray on Instagram and LinkedIn.
SHORT BIO:
Michael McRay is a nationally recognized storytelling expert and trainer, sought-after experiential coach, and dynamic keynote speaker. He is the Head of Istoria’s Institute for Narrative Intelligence and the founder of Becoming Restoried, a coaching practice for people yearning to reconcile to their life stories. Michael is the award-winning author of I Am Not Your Enemy: Stories to Transform a Divided World. His facilitation and story prowess have attracted names like NASA and TEDx. He lives in Nashville, TN. Learn more at www.michaelmcray.com
LONG BIO:
Michael McRay is a nationally recognized storytelling expert and trainer, sought-after experiential coach, and dynamic keynote speaker. He is the Head of Istoria’s Institute for Narrative Intelligence and the founder of Becoming Restoried, a coaching practice for people yearning to reconcile to their life stories. Michael also founded and hosts Tenx9 (“ten by nine”) Nashville, the city’s longest-running storytelling series. Michael is the award-winning author of I Am Not Your Enemy: Stories to Transform a Divided World, and he holds a Master’s in Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation from Trinity College in Dublin. His facilitation and story prowess have attracted names like NASA and TEDx. He lives in Nashville, TN.
In case you want to know…
Education
Certification, Experiential Coach (Level 2) | International Society of Experiential Professionals, 2023
Training in Psychodrama (1 Year) | International Society of Experiential Professionals, 2023
Certificate, Integrated Somatic Trauma Therapy | The Embody Lab, 2022
Certification, Conflict Coaching | Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, 2021
Executive Certification, Public Narrative: Leadership Storytelling, and Action | Harvard Kennedy School, 2020
M.Phil, Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation Studies | Trinity College Dublin at Belfast, 2013
B.A., History | Lipscomb University, Nashville, TN, 2011
Publications
The Wild Way: A Field Guide from the In-Between | forthcoming Fall 2025
Narrative Intelligence, with Harris III | forthcoming, Spring 2026
I Am Not Your Enemy: Stories to Transform a Divided World, foreword by Ishmael Beah (winner of 2020 Best Book Award in Social Change) | 2020
Keep Watch with Me: An Advent Reader for Peacemakers, with Claire Brown | 2019
Where the River Bends: Considering Forgiveness in the Lives of Prisoners, foreword by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Desmond Tutu | 2015
Letters from “Apartheid Street”: A Christian Peacemaker in Occupied Palestine, foreword by Lee C. Camp | 2013