Selected Reporting & Essays

For Still: The Journal. A meditation on uprooting and letting go. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

For Oxford American magazine. An exploration of the force that animates, at Knoxville, Tennessee’s strange music festival, Big Ears.

For Oxford American magazine. Walking the East Tennessee woods and coalfields with root-digger and “forest granny” Carol Judy.

For Orion magazine. Going morel-hunting in the forests of Southwest Virginia.

For Orion magazine. Stories of Spitzenburg apples and mescal agave in the Guadalupe Mountains of West Texas.

For Virginia Quarterly Review’s True Story series. The author's photographs paired with mini-essays & reportage about the proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline that would run 303 miles through West Virginia and Virginia.

For the On Being radio program blog. A meditation at the Winter Solstice.

For the On Being radio program blog. In response to a South Carolina shooting.

For Oxford American magazine. How four million tons of Tennessee coal ash ended up in Alabama’s Black Belt.