about me

I'm a journalist, historian, and editor based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Right now, I'm writing a book for Farrar Straus & Giroux about the history of northwest Arkansas—the region that incubated Walmart, Tyson, J.B. Hunt, and Bill Clinton—as an origin story for American neoliberalism.

Northwest Arkansas isn't just a site of massive capital accumulation and multiple Fortune 500 companies; it's also my home. I grew up here in Walmart's shadow, an upbringing I didn't understand as particularly unique until moving away from the region for college. Since then, I've been trying to understand the fundamental weirdness of this place, a company region home to the richest family in the world and some of the poorest workers in the country. Following these interests in rural places, labor, capital, and the history of American politics and economy for the better part of a decade has taken me around the South and the country.

I've worked at The Atlantic, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Institute for Southern Studies' magazine Facing South. There, as an investigative reporter, I spent nearly two years reporting on COVID-19's impact on Southern poultry processing workers, a series which has been cited in Congressional investigations, academic research, and national and international news organizations.

I went to grad school because I wanted to understand the history of the places, people, and systems I wrote about as a journalist—and because I missed reading books with other people. I'm trained as a historian of labor, capitalism, and culture. A few years ago, I worked with the Institute for Southern Studies to digitize the full archive of Southern Exposure, an award-winning magazine of literature, culture, and politics born out of the civil rights & labor movements of the 1970s. My essays and reporting have appeared in the New York Review of Books, n+1, The American Prospect, Southlands, The Nation, The Atlantic, and The Guardian, among other publications. Recently, I've written about my conflicted relationship with the work of Wendell Berry, J.D. Vance's historical antecedents, Walmart in the Trump era, and the politics of land in Appalachia after Hurricane Helene.

I'm completing my Ph.D. in History at the University of Virginia. I'm currently a fellow at the Watchdog Writer's Group at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and I've been awarded grants and fellowships from the Organization of American Historians, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, and the Hagley Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, and the Southern Movement Media Fund, among others. My article in Agricultural History received the 2026 Everett E. Edwards Award from the Agricultural History Society. I've been interviewed about my research by the New York Review of Books and the Daily Yonder and given invited talks at the Yale School of the Environment and the Ozarks Studies Symposium.

I'm represented by William Callahan at Inkwell Management.