Mississippi Delta: Returning Home to Its Haunted Past
Fate brought me back to Mississippi, and I fell in love with a troubled part of the state known around the world as the birthplace of the blues.
Gold Winner of a 2024 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award
Outside, June 8, 2023
Must the Professor Crusade? On Literature and Activism
On how literature holds the power to change the way we look at the world.
Winner of the 2021 McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonfiction
The Southwest Review, Volume 106, Issue 1, Winter 2021
How Cities in the American North Can Reckon With Their Monuments
There are no statues honoring the Confederacy to be found in Boston or Cambridge, but there are plenty of historic memorials that obscure the achievements of Black Americans
The New Yorker, October 22, 2021
With a Little Help from Her Friends
The “Negro” Extension Service as a Tool for Agency in the Segregated South
The Oxford American, June 19, 2023
The Dimming Mystique of Mileston
The Oxford American, Summer/Fall 2020
Literary Life in a Plague Year
Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2020
How Much Did the History of American Chattel Slavery Shape William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!?
On the Connection Between Faulkner’s Fiction, His Longtime Home, and the University of Mississippi, LitHub, July 29, 2021
What Makes Me Black? What Makes You White?
The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2018
Mississippi: The Two Flag State
The New Yorker, April 30, 2016
Dare to Look: Al Clayton and the Photography of Hunger
Gravy, The Journal of the Southern Foodways Alliance, Summer 2018
Color Lines: How DNA Ancestry Testing Can Turn Our Notions of Race and Ethnicity Upside Down
The American Scholar, Spring 2013
Jessye Norman Was a Diva Whose Voice Could Not Be Denied
CNN.com, October 2, 2019
Mississippi ICE Raids Are a Call to Action for the Civil Rights Generation
CNN.com, August 12, 2019
Mississippi’s Past, Not Its Future, Won the 2018 Senate Race
Opinion, CNN.com, November 28, 2018
The Land the Internet Era Forgot
WIRED, November 7, 2015 (Photo by Tabitha Soren)
Atticus Finch Confronted What the South Couldn’t
Time magazine, July 20, 2015
Passing Strange
The Common, Issue 12, November 2016
Mississippi Is No Longer A World Unto Itself
CNN Opinion, July 7, 2022
The Unhealed Wounds of a Mass Arrest of Black Students at Ole Miss, Fifty Years Later
The New Yorker, February 23, 2020
A Distant Goal We Seek
The Georgia Review, Spring 2020
What the Face of Emmett Till Says About Every Brutalized Black Body—Then and Now
Vanity Fair, June 4, 2020
Mississippi’s Notorious Parchman Prison Doesn'tHave to be a Death Machine
CNN.com Opinion, February 8, 2020
How gospel music helped me find my Catholic identity
America: The Jesuit Review, February 18, 2019
Joe Biden’s Political Amnesia Goes Way Beyond Anita Hill
Vanity Fair.com, April 29, 2019
Remembering the Pioneering Black Journalist Simeon Booker, “the Man from Jet”
The New Yorker, December 12, 2017
Still Learning From Dad: A Son Relishes Counsel That Comes in Dreams
The Washington Post, Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Triumph of the Wills
Virginia Quarterly Review, August 16, 2017
Searching for Soul Food in the Once Chocolate City
Gravy, The Journal of the Southern Foodways Alliance, Winter 2016