Welcome!

Thank you for visiting the site. I write about Deep South politics and culture, looking for how big truths pulse in individual stories. Mine, for instance, 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. I like to spot the currents submerged beneath a subject, including the way the South’s past permeates its present. Bonus points for wry humor, even when it’s bittersweet. It often is.

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 New Madrid, as well as on Mississippi public radio, where I was also a reporter.

Three years ago, I launched The Admissions Project an online forum about the impact of the South’s circa 1970 segregation academies on its past and present.

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.