If you're looking for a writer to aggregate content, regurgitate press releases, or deify pundits, I'm not the one. If you're looking for a writer to spew statistics, quote jargon, and bill by the hour, well, that's not me either.
If you want to know how people feel, what they think, and who they are, I might be your writer. If you want a seasoned journalist who prefers to be in the field instead of behind a desk, someone equally skilled with both pen and camera, someone who keeps a suitcase packed and notebook ready, I might be your writer. If you want a journalist who is a native Southerner — who understands its people, knows its terrain, remembers its past and cares about its future — I might be your writer.
Because if it's people you want to reach, I'm all in. And if you've got a story, you've got my interest. Email me today.
Reading Time: 6 minutesAnthony Harris keeps his dog tags hanging inside his truck. Brent Stoufer and Joshua Matson wear camouflage ball caps while on their routes. All three have something in common: They are military veterans and are among the first drivers to participate in Hunt’s Heroes, a new program officially launched in April by J.B. Hunt Transport Services.
Reading Time: 4 minutesGospel-gabbing used car salesman Allen Jones gives cars to seniors in Caledonia. Music teacher Angie Riffell creates a unique homeschool opportunity in Columbus. And Dorothy Ryland gives West Point residents the keys to the American Dream.
Reading Time: 4 minutes“I spoke with my wife and said, ‘Baby, we’re working and making everybody else rich, but we can live real good if we put ourselves out there,” says J.B. Hunt owner operator Anthony Branch. By leasing on as an owner operator, he is able to run his company without having his job run his life.
Reading Time: 12 minutesFor most of the 20th century, blacks were buying one-way tickets out of the Jim Crow South in hopes of a better life. Nearly 6 million African-Americans followed the railroads to places like Detroit and Chicago, never dreaming that their children and grandchildren would someday lead a return migration, chasing the American dream back down the Mississippi and straight across the Mason-Dixon line.
Reading Time: 5 minutesBy the time Sam Shifflett could walk, he knew he wanted to drive. Dump trucks, fire trucks, big rigs — he loved them all. So when he signed on with J.B. Hunt Transport Services in January 1997, he immediately felt at home. There was only one problem — he didn’t want to live on the road.
Reading Time: 4 minutesIt was well past dark when the man and the boy finally got the cattle unloaded. The road was empty and the man was tired. The boy had been driving farm trucks around the family ranch for several years. The boy was ready, the man figured. He handed over the keys and climbed into the passenger seat to catch some much-needed shuteye.
Reading Time: 2 minutesSome nights, when Jon Gault felt his worst, he wondered if he would live long enough to see his 17-year-old son go to college or to walk his daughter, now 8, down the aisle. So when the Seattle resident signed up for Washington’s state-run Obamacare exchange in October, he was jubilant.
Reading Time: 2 minutesLast year, when James Seal left his job as an insulator at shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries in Pascagoula, Miss., he said goodbye to his Blue Cross Blue Shield plan. Since then, he and his wife have paid cash for medical care or visited the hospital emergency room. But mostly, they’ve gritted their teeth through health challenges. It is a strategy that has worked for the most part.
Reading Time: 15 minutesHot-button issues like racial profiling, police stop-and-frisk practices, and social justice have joined global causes like immigration reform, women’s rights, and issues affecting other minority communities, suggesting a blurring of the lines between the ideological underpinnings of today’s youth-led civil rights movement and that of the 1960s. Call it Civil Rights 2.0.
Reading Time: 5 minutesDeath did not ride in with a thundering of horses’ hooves on a cloud of gun smoke, though no doubt Heaven is a bit more lively since Macedonia native Bessie Morton’s arrival April 27. After a lifetime of adventure, it must have seemed anti-climactic, but at 87, she had slowed down a little, so perhaps death took note and crept softly, so as not to awaken Noxubee County’s self-proclaimed honky-tonk angel.
Reading Time: 7 minutesShe left her clothes on the back porch. She left her gold, Hunt High School Class of ’56 ring on the dresser. She left her baby, Gloria, in her sister Betsy’s arms. And then, on a hot summer day in 1960, Lyrian Wyvonne Barry boarded a Greyhound bus bound for St. Louis and disappeared behind a cloud of Mississippi dust.
Reading Time: 5 minutesIt has become the benchmark by which all storms are measured. It has become the stark demarcation between life before and after, with Hurricane Katrina sitting squarely in the middle of coastal residents’ collective memory — as vivid today as the muddy water lines and red spray-paint which can still be seen on homes uninhabitable, abandoned.
