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Mitch Albom American author, journalist and musician, was born into a Jewish family with an older sister and younger brother. He celebrates May 23, 1958, as his birth date in Passaic, N.J. Mitch grew up wanting to be a cartoonist when he started reading and collecting comic books. He loved music and taught himself to play the piano and played in several bands throughout his years as a youth.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1979 in Sociology, and after graduation, he worked as a music performer in Europe as well as America. He also wrote several songs and had them produced. Later, he earned his master’s degree in Journalism, spent time doing sports writing before beginning to write motivational books.

Mitch is best-known for his book “Tuesdays with Morrie,” published in 1997, a memoir of one of his professors Morrie Schwartz, who suffered with Lou Gehrig’s disease. This book remained on the New York Times best seller list for four years and gave Mitch worldwide respect. Mitch would visit Morrie every Tuesday to talk about life and death, and was able to help Morrie pay all of his medical bills through publication of this book. A television movie of this book was produced by Oprah Winfrey and won four Emmy Awards, and was said to be the most-watched TV movie of 1999. Four of his best-sellers were made into TV movies.

Morrie told Mitch “Giving Is Living,” and this led Mitch to begin charities such as SAY Detroit in 2006 and Have Faith Haiti in 2010, which is a home and school to some 60 kids which Mitch visits every month. Mitch married Janine in 1995 and they live in Detroit, Mich. They adopted a little girl, Chika Jeune from a Haitian orphanage that they traveled to and worked with. She died at the age of seven from a brain tumor. In 2019, he published a book “Finding Chika,” which was about their time with her.

We have several of his books (F) “The First Phone Call from Heaven,” “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” “For One More Day,” “The Little Liar,” “The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto,” “The Next Person You Meet in Heaven,” “The Stranger in the Lifeboat,” “The Time Keeper,” (NF) “Have A Little Faith” and “Tuesdays with Morrie.”