A native son returned to New Jersey recently to share his journey from deafness to the hearing world.

Michael Chorost, an award-winning author from Westfield, was welcomed back in November by his alma mater, the Summit Speech School in New Providence. He and his good friend and fellow writer Josh Swiller read from their respective memoirs on deafness to an audience that included Michael's mother, Susan Chorost.

Chorost's book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, is an account of his receiving a cochlear implant in 2001. (The book has been published in paperback with a new subtitle, My Journey Back to the Hearing World, and has been optioned for a movie.)

Swiller read from his first book, The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa, an intensely personal memoir of his experience working with the Peace Corps in Zambia in the mid-1990s. Swiller, who lives in Brooklyn, received a cochlear implant almost a decade after that.

Chorost, now living in San Francisco, as a preschooler attended the Summit Speech School, which this year has been celebrating its 40th year of educating deaf and hard-of-hearing children. He graduated from there in 1970 and went on to attend the regular public schools in Westfield and later to gain a PhD in humanities computing from the University of Texas at Austin. He was fitted with hearing aids at the age of three, but after he lost his remaining hearing in 2001, he got a "mystifyingly mechanical" cochlear implant, a receiver, and an electrode system that simulates natural hearing.

His memoir won the PEN USA award for Creative Nonfiction in 2006, and was a Reader's Digest Editor's Choice in August 2005.

In addition to teaching at the University of San Francisco and giving public lectures and media interviews around the country, Chorost has written for Wired, The Futurist, The Scientist, Technology Review, and Sky. He wrote the script for a TV special on brain implants titled The 22nd Century, which aired on PBS last January.

Susan Chorost lives in Westfield and still belongs to Temple Emanu-El, where Michael celebrated becoming a bar mitzva. She works at the speech school, as an assistant technology coordinator, and — with understandable maternal pride — described the double reading as "a great success despite horrible foggy weather."