Michael Hardy is a Houston-based senior editor at Texas Monthly. His reporting has appeared in The New York Times, WIRED, New York Magazine, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Vox, Playboy, The Texas Observer, and Texas Highways. From 2013 to 2015 he was the arts editor of Houstonia magazine, where he won the 2015 City and Regional Magazine Association award for best arts and culture writing. Before that he freelanced part-time while attending graduate school in English literature at Rutgers University. In 2009-2010 he worked in Sri Lanka as a reporter and editor for the now-defunct English-language newspaper The Sunday Leader, an experience he later wrote about for The American Scholar. As an undergraduate at Rice University he completed editorial internships at The Boston Globe, The Houston Chronicle, and Texas Monthly. He holds a B.A. from Rice and a M.A. from Rutgers, both in English literature.