My Grandfather on my daddy's side and my grandma on my momma's side used to try
and cuss their miseries away. They could out-cuss any damn body I have ever
seen. I am only an amateur cusser at best, but I inherited other things from
these people who grew up on the ridges and deep in the hollows of northeastern
Alabama, the foothills of the Appalachians. They taught me, on a thousand front
porch nights, as a million jugs passed from hand to hand, how to tell a story.
I make my living at it now, as a national correspondent for The New York
Times, based in my native South (Atlanta). It was my dream to do this
someday, but some things even I was afraid to dream.
In 1996, I was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, for what the
judges called "elegantly written stories on contemporary America."
They included stories on the country sheriff who caught Susan Smith, an Alabama
prison where old inmates go to die, a Mississippi washerwoman who became a
national hero, and the nightmare bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma
City. I also won the prestigious American Society of Newspaper Editor's
Distinguished Writing Award, for the second time. I have won more than 40
journalism awards, including several awards that might have actually helped
people.
But the best thing that happened to me in 1996 was the contract for this book
(All Over But The Shoutin'), which allowed me to keep a promise I had made to my mother--a woman who
picked cotton, scrubbed floors and took in washing and ironing--who went 18
years without a new dress so I could have school clothes.
With the advance from this book, I bought her a house, the first house she
ever owned.
I teach writing at the Poynter Institute for media studies, at National
Writers Workshops around the country. I taught some workshops at Harvard, and
several newspapers have asked me to do in-house writing workshops, including The
Times.
My stories are included in several "best of" collections of
newspaper writing. I have written for the New York Times Sunday Magazine,
and others.
For good or bad, I am kind of unusual for a Times man. I have been at The
Times for just three years, for the first six months on Metro in New York,
writing about the homeless, violence, welfare hotels, other miseries, then
covered Haiti for more than two months during the worst of the killing there in
the late summer and the fall of 1994. I came home to find that I had been
promoted to the national desk. They sent me home, almost, to Atlanta.
Before The Times, I worked briefly at The Los Angeles Times, a
failed experiment, and before that as a roving national correspondent for the St.
Petersburg Times.
In 1992-93, I was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, the only real
college I ever had. I think I was filling their white trash quota. I went just
six months to Jacksonville State University, in Alabama, in the 1970s.
Before the Nieman, I was the St. Petersburg Times Miami Bureau Chief,
covering south Florida, Haiti, the outbreak of the Gulf War, and other balmy
places. Before Florida, I was a reporter in my native Alabama, at The
Birmingham News, Anniston Star, Talladega Daily Home and Jacksonville
News. I wrote about cockfights, speed trap towns, serial killers, George
Wallace, Bear Bryant, and Richard Petty.
I was born in a small town hospital in northeastern Alabama on July 26, 1959.
My momma went into labor about three-quarters of the way through the "Ten
Commandments," which was showing at the Midway Drive-In. I am not making
this up. I think it's in Chapter Four.
Since then, I have lived in Jacksonville, Anniston and Birmingham, all in
Alabama, in Clearwater, Bradenton, Miami and St. Petersburg, in Florida, and
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Los Angeles, the corner of 110th and Broadway, New
York City, and now Atlanta. I spend at least a quarter of the year in New
Orleans, for The Times.
I am seldom at home. I am not married. If I had a dog, it would starve.
Photo copyright Marion Etlinger
This biography was last updated on 08/01/2001.
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