Welcome!

Thank you for stopping by. I write about Deep South politics and culture, looking at how big truths pulse in individual stories. There’s mine in The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning. Level fields, whiteness, women, resilience, visual art, French and food are topics I think about. Bonus points for writing with wry humor, even when it’s bittersweet. It often is.

I like to spot the currents submerged beneath a subject, including the way the South’s past permeates its present. Using the present to reckon with the past is the way to a better future.

My essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Baffler, Oxford American, The Bitter Southerner, Scalawag, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes and Salvation South, as well as on Mississippi public radio, where I was also a reporter.

Five years ago, I launched The Admissions Project an online forum of first-person accounts of post-1970 schooling in the South, whether in public schools or in legacy segregation academies.

My documentary Eyes on Mississippi, a 56-minute film on the career of iconic civil-rights journalist Bill Minor, has screened at universities and other venues around the country and is set to air on Mississippi Public Broadcasting on December 4.