Essays

A Way of Seeing the Mississippi Delta

Landscape photographs as evidence of the region’s past and present inequities

The Oxford American, January 6, 2026

Passing Strange

The Common, Issue 12, November 2016

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

Retranslating the Blues: Reclaiming and Reinterpreting a Blues-Inflected Life

The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2025

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

How Cities in the American North Can Reckon With Their Monuments

The “Negro” Extension Service as a Tool for Agency in the Segregated South

The Oxford American, June 19, 2023

With a Little Help from Her Friends

The Dimming Mystique of Mileston

The Oxford American, Summer/Fall 2020

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

Must the Professor Crusade? On Literature and Activism

Mississippi Is No Longer A World Unto Itself

CNN Opinion, July 7, 2022

Literary Life in a Plague Year

Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2020

What Makes Me Black? What Makes You White?

The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2018

A Distant Goal We Seek

The Georgia Review, Spring 2020

The Unhealed Wounds of a Mass Arrest of Black Students at Ole Miss, Fifty Years Later

The New Yorker, February 23, 2020

Mississippi: The Two Flag State

The New Yorker, April 30, 2016

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 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

Dare to Look: Al Clayton and the Photography of Hunger

Gravy, The Journal of the Southern Foodways Alliance, Summer 2018

Mississippi’s Past, Not Its Future, Won the 2018 Senate Race

Opinion, CNN.com, November 28, 2018

Joe Biden’s Political Amnesia Goes Way Beyond Anita Hill

Vanity Fair.com, April 29, 2019

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

How gospel music helped me find my Catholic identity

America: The Jesuit Review, February 18, 2019

Virginia Quarterly Review, August 16, 2017

Triumph of the Wills

Mississippi Delta: Returning Home to

Its Haunted Past

Remembering the Pioneering Black Journalist Simeon Booker, “the Man from Jet”

The New Yorker, December 12, 2017

Searching for Soul Food in the Once Chocolate City

Gravy, The Journal of the Southern Foodways Alliance, Winter 2016

Atticus Finch Confronted What the South Couldn’t

Time magazine, July 20, 2015

The Land the Internet Era Forgot

WIRED, November 7, 2015 (Photo by Tabitha Soren)

Color Lines: How DNA Ancestry Testing Can Turn Our Notions of Race and Ethnicity Upside Down



The American Scholar, Spring 2013

Still Learning From Dad: A Son Relishes Counsel That Comes in Dreams

The Washington Post, Tuesday, June 13, 2006