I’m a reporter and writer living in New Orleans. My work has appeared in New York Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The New Republic, The Oxford American, and The Paris Review, among other publications. I like journalism that deals with the invisible forces that shape our lives and shows us how history is acting upon us. There’s a picture of Robert Caro tacked on the wall beside my desk.
After several years at newspapers and several more in magazines, I moved to Mobile, Alabama, in early 2020 to work on a book manuscript: a comprehensive history of Africatown, the community founded by the last group of enslaved people brought from West Africa to the US, which has been engulfed for decades by industrial pollution and blight. The book, now forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press, tracks the neighborhood’s development over 160 years, showing how the legal structure of Jim Crow shaped the geography of Mobile as it industrialized; but it also chronicles the Africatown community's equally long history of defiance and self-determination. The final chapters highlight the ongoing efforts of neighborhood activists to save the place from extinction.
After several years at newspapers and several more in magazines, I moved to Mobile, Alabama, in early 2020 to work on a book manuscript: a comprehensive history of Africatown, the community founded by the last group of enslaved people brought from West Africa to the US, which has been engulfed for decades by industrial pollution and blight. The book, now forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press, tracks the neighborhood’s development over 160 years, showing how the legal structure of Jim Crow shaped the geography of Mobile as it industrialized; but it also chronicles the Africatown community's equally long history of defiance and self-determination. The final chapters highlight the ongoing efforts of neighborhood activists to save the place from extinction.