Alec Yoshio MacDonald

Alec Yoshio MacDonald is a journalist who writes frequently about the environment. He’s currently the editor of the Bay Area Monitor, a magazine about environmental policy published by the League of Women Voters of the Bay Area. He also works as a freelance book editor, currently under contract with Straus Literary. Formerly, Alec was a reporter for the Nichi Bei Times covering community affairs, the arts, sports, and the environment. He continues to contribute to the newspaper, and has written for other publications such as Hyphen magazine, Nikkei Heritage, The Chicago Shimpo, the East Bay Express, and San Francisco Weekly. He has completed a Dat Winning Fellowship and produced a multimedia oral history project about postwar community sports for the Chicago Japanese American Historical Society. Alec holds a bachelor’s degree in literature from UC Berkeley and a master’s degree in the humanities from the University of Chicago, where he wrote his thesis on John Okada’s book No-No Boy. He lives with his wife and son in Oakland, where he raises chickens and gardens with reckless abandon.