C-VILLE Weekly / February 2025
Led by an eccentric emcee, a retirement community starts a podcast: The C’Dogs of Charlottesville.
VCU Magazine / Summer 2024
Artist Willie Anne Wright found the dreamy world of pinhole photography by chance — or did she?
VCU Magazine / Summer 2024
Merle McCann, an HIV/AIDS activist who spent 30 years as a hospital psychiatrist, considers a morbid paradox.
C-VILLE Weekly / July 2024
On an ordinary Thursday night, a writer considers the romance of six hotel bars.
VCU Magazine / Fall 2023
Elemental cooking always fascinated Buz Grossberg, one-time Food Network star and the proprietor of Richmond’s landmark
Buz and Ned’s Real Barbecue. After four decades, the pitmaster is still exploring the bond between man and fire.
VCU Magazine / Fall 2023
Author Rachel Beanland balances modern tastes and historical accuracy in her new novel, The House Is on Fire. In this story and annotated excerpt, she explains how.
VCU Magazine / Fall 2023
Tyler Fauntleroy, who plays John Laurens and Philip Hamiltonin the North American tour, reflects on being part of the Tony-winning musical.
VCU Magazine / Fall 2023
VCU Brandcenter Executive Director Vann Graves explains why design history is repeating itself.
VCU Magazine / Fall 2023
“Excellent thinker” Ryan Odom, who orchestrated the biggest upset in NCAA history, takes a patient approach to coaching.
VCU Magazine / Spring 2023
It’s a new era for psychedelic research. Long-banned drugs like LSD and psilocybin are being reevaluated for their therapeutic potential against depression and addiction. VCU biochemist Javier González-Maeso is separating the mystical from medical science.
VCU Magazine / Spring 2023
A now somewhat-forgotten president created America’s professional civil service in 1883 and, by extension, modern U.S. government. Since then, civil servants have flourished and grown more and more necessary, all in the face of never-ending aspersions.
VCU Magazine / Spring 2023
Farah “Cocoa” Brown spent a decade learning to be a stand-up comic, but it took real life to teach her how to be funny. Here, the alumna and veteran entertainer — she’s worked with Tyler Perry and has recurring roles on Fox’s 9-1-1 and Netflix’s Never Have I Ever — talks about the state of stand-up, her comedic voice and how she embraced Farah to find Cocoa.
VCU Magazine / Fall 2022 / 5,288 words
Sisters Enjoli and Sesha Joi Moon are using their nonprofit, the JXN Project, to explore the lost grandeur of Richmond’s Jackson Ward neighborhood.
Washington (D.C.) City Paper / December 2021 / 1,637 words
Research suggests that passing time at a pub can be as good for your emotional well-being as it is for your social life.
Washington (D.C.) City Paper / August 2021 / 1,662 words
When the pandemic cost me my job and apartment, the owners of The Public Option in Langdon Park took me in.
GW Magazine / Spring 2020 / 3,910 words
Lonnie Bunch spent a decade as a GW professor and then founded the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In March, he talked about the importance of history, how we tell stories — and who tells them.
GW Magazine / Summer 2019 / 1,531 words
When Virginia’s Renaissance festival folded in 1999, Cornelia Rutherford put up her $52,000 retirement to save it.
GW Magazine / Spring 2020 / 3,910 words
For more than a century, a U.S. border town and its Mexican counterpart have thrown a festival to mark George Washington’s birthday. GW professor Elaine Peña went home to understand why, and what it says about people and dividing lines.
GW Magazine / Spring 2019 / 5,157 words
In 2010, worn down by nearly a decade of covering the worst of humanity, conflict photographer Kate Brooks decided to turn her lens elsewhere. She’s spent the past six years making The Last Animals, a documentary about poaching and the illegal ivory and rhino horn trades. This is how she went from combat to conservation.
GW Magazine / Fall 2018 / 5,025 words
Chef Patrick O’Connell shaped a rural town in his whimsical image, building a Michelin-starred restaurant and remaking Washington, Va., as a gastronome’s paradise. Forty years in, realm and creator are all but indistinguishable.
GW Magazine / Fall 2018 / 3,384 words
Comic book artist Chris Burnham spent two years drawing Batman. It wasn’t as glamorous as he imagined, but it led somewhere big: making a comic with Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman.
GW Magazine / Summer 2018 / 5,108 words
After years on the spoken-word circuit, the poet is conquering the novel. Her debut, The Poet X, is a New York Times bestseller. It also seems like the book she was meant to write.
GW Magazine / Summer 2018 / 3,914 words
When a family illness prematurely ended GW engineering professor Murray Snyder’s career as a submarine commander, he turned to academia. He got his Ph.D. at age 47, and for the past nine years, he’s studied ship air wakes for the U.S. Navy.
GW Magazine / Summer 2018 / 1,429 words
Former MLB catcher John Flaherty, who for 13 seasons has called New York Yankees games for the YES Network, talks about the crossover to broadcasting and toeing the line to be the fans’ advocate in the booth.
GW Magazine / Spring 2018 / 3,946 words
Lysa Puma was hit by a thunderbolt at the Tibetan Freedom Concert on June 13, 1998. Twenty years later, she has a normal life — but she still has “lightning days.”
GW Magazine / Spring 2018 / 1,442 words
University athletic departments more and more are hiring, either full-time or as contractors, registered dietitians to minister to their athletes. The trend started at Nebraska in 1994, and it’s on the verge of going industry-wide.
GW Magazine / Fall 2017 / 4,981 words
Former college softball player Elana Meyers Taylor has used a daredevil style to become one of the greatest women’s bobsled pilots in U.S. history. She’s won four world championships, Olympic bronze and Olympic silver, and in February in South Korea, she’s the favorite for Olympic gold.
GW Magazine / Summer 2017 / 4,636 words
Two-time Oscar winner Bill Westenhofer is responsible for the visual effects in some of Hollywood’s biggest films of the past 20 years, including Elf, Life of Pi and this summer’s Wonder Woman.
GW Magazine / Summer 2017 / 845 words
The NFL Players Association spokesman talks about being a spokesman in a post-facts world.
GW Magazine / Spring 2017 / 955 words
Twenty years ago, sixth-generation winemaker Steven Mirassou confronted his lineage. Today, he defines it.
GW Magazine / Spring 2017 / 1,066 words
Susie Selby started her winery in 1994, and for five years she worked at another winery just to keep hers going.
GW Magazine / Spring 2017 / 2,450 words
A line by line perspective
Sometimes things don’t work out. Colombian-born Corcoran professor Juana Medina knows this as well as anyone. But the children’s book illustrator and author also knows that sometimes they do, and that’s enough to keep her cheery in the face of gloom.
GW Magazine / Spring 2017 / 2,717 words
Transcendent blues
Scott Rosenbaum spent nearly a decade making his documentary, Sidemen: Long Road to Glory. Along the way he became a custodian of the legacy of three old bluesmen — and their friend.
GW Magazine / Fall 2016 / 3,106 words
One afternoon in January
Fifty years ago, GW’s football program ended for a sixth and final time. But 10 years before it was dropped, GW football rose to its zenith, the greatest season in program history and a singular moment on the national stage.
GW Magazine / Spring 2016 / 817 words
Exhibit at the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery displays rarely seen works from GW’s permanent collection including an early Norman Rockwell oil painting.
GW Magazine / Spring 2016 / 4,327 words
In addition to history
Novelist Thomas Mallon imagines what lies between the facts in the lives of presidents and those around them.
GW Magazine / Summer 2016 / 4,837 words
Iconic photographer and eternal San Franciscan Michael Zagaris has shot rock gods and all-stars, stood up to The Man and almost died twice. He’s spent his life doing everything you always wanted to do, and now that he’s getting older… absolutely nothing’s changed.