In Running With Ghosts, author Matt Tullis reminds us that surviving childhood cancer can be a challenge as formidable as fighting for your life–and more enduring. The eldest of three sons born to a trucker and an office-worker, who lived in the idyllic village of Apple Creek, Ohio, Tullis was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at age 15. In short order, the sports-mad teenager found himself on the cancer ward of Akron Children’s Hospital. One of the lucky ones, he walked out and kept on going.

Years later, as a journalist and college professor, Tullis began to wonder about all the friends and caregivers he’d left behind on 4-North. As his curiosity intensified, he decided to seek them out. Running With Ghosts is about friendship, loss, triumph, and closure: one man’s effort to understand more fully a life shaped by a random mutation in the code of his DNA.

Matt Tullis is an assistant professor of digital journalism and English at Fairfield University. He is the host and producer of Gangrey: The Podcast and is an associate editor for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative . He has an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and has been noted in The Best American Sports Writing three times, and The Best American Essays once. He lives with his wife and two children in Newtown, Connecticut.