first round

(16) marshall crenshaw, “someday, someway”
decolonialized
(1) usa for africa, “we are the world”
238-199
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/4/23.

Game Time Remaining

Once, We Were the World: michael sheehan on “we are the world”

1: I hope someday you will join us

In March 2020, Lionel Richie told People that he wanted to bring back “We Are the World.” It was the 35th anniversary of the recording and release of the song, written by Richie and Michael Jackson and recorded by a who’s-who of 80s music celebrity as a response to a soul-coring BBC report on the famine in Ethiopia. In March 2020, Richie kept hearing the chorus of the song—“There’s a choice we’re making, we’re saving our own lives”—and thinking of the act of isolation in Covid lockdown as well as the empathetic recognition that “we are all in this together,” that a virus affecting people in Wuhan, China is also affecting us here in the USA. The country, not the United Support of Artists. We are the world, the world is us; to save the world is to save ourselves; to save ourselves is to save the world.
In a parenthetical, People noted the obvious: “(A group recording in one place together like for the 1985 song is obviously not possible during shelter-in-place orders and self-isolation.)”
Thus, what we got in March 2020 was not “We Are the World” but an “Imagine” celebrity singalong on Instagram, coordinated by Gal Gadot and received with brutal side-eye: “You might say that every crisis gets the multi-celebrity car-crash pop anthem it deserves, but truly no crisis—certainly not one as vast and unsettling as the current one—deserves this,” wrote The New York Times. On Instagram, Gadot says the exact same thing Richie did, “we are all in this together,” as she sets up the song project. “No need for greed and hunger,” sings Will Ferrell. “A brotherhood of man,” Mark Ruffalo continues, seemingly from his bed.
Perhaps the failure of Gadot’s effort is due to the failure of its musical talent; many YouTube commenters on the official music video for “We Are the World” make this case, that the level of star power in one room could not be matched, would in fact blow away any effort today to bring contemporary celebrities together to make a hit—er, around a cause.
Maybe these commenters are right; maybe the one-hit-wonderness of “We Are the World” is necessary, the song and its “historic recording” unrepeatable: one time to bring all the stars together for one reason, as Richie said later, “a mission to save lives.” For one thing, there are now fewer one hit wonders. It’s also true that the most recent album of the other author—who quietly made it clear he was the primary author—of this multi-celebrity pop anthem was Thriller, the best selling album of all time. (His next album, Bad, is the 11th best selling of all time. In fact, Thriller was the best selling album of 1983 and again 1984, the first album in US history to do this.) But maybe such a mission, to save lives, is itself inherently not a one-time effort. Maybe empathy likewise is not a momentary change but an ongoingness; not a top pop hit but a lasting cultural shift.

2: We are the ones who make a brighter day

Released on March 7th, 1985, “We Are the World” sold 20 million copies and raised $63 million dollars in aid for Ethiopia, which was undergoing a multiyear famine that ultimately killed 1.25 million people.
There’s a choice we’re making: focus on the story of the song or the story of the famine or the story of the song as charity effort to aid the famine.
The story of the song has become its own sort of subgenre: along with the official music video there was an hourlong documentary hosted by Jane Fonda and filled with footage from the recording (in which she says it came from a “crisis more urgent to them than musical differences or individual renown”), a LIFE cover piece that later became a book, then a minute-by-minute Rolling Stone revisitation published around the time Richie called for a 35th anniversary Covid version, and on and on.
Lionel Richie told the story of writing the song in an interview with Kevin Spacey, specifically how Jackon’s pet boa slithered onto his shoulders as they sat working out the lyrics.
(Things that haven’t aged well: Kevin Spacey.)
And Michael Jackson told the story of writing the song, or his inspiration for doing so, in his autobiography Moonwalk:

Around that time, I used to ask my sister Janet to follow me into a room with interesting acoustics, like a closet or the bathroom, and I’d sing to her, just a note, a rhythm of a note…I’d just hum from the bottom of my throat. I’d say, “Janet, what do you see…when you hear this sound?” And this time she said, “Dying children in Africa.”
“You’re right. That’s what I was dictating from my soul.”

The origin of the idea was arguably both the BBC’s report on the famine and the formation of Band Aid in the UK to record and release their single “Do They Even Know it’s Christmas,” in which a lineup of British stars pose the titular question. Memorably, that song—which remains perennially popular—contrasts how great Christmas is “in our world of plenty” with “the other ones” in whose world “the only water flowing / is the bitter sting of tears / and the Christmas bells that ring / there are the clanging chimes of doom.” Band Aid was engineered by Bob Geldof, fresh off his role as Pink in The Wall, who would also later bring about Live Aid, the massive concert to raise money for the famine.
Within a month of the release of “Do They Even Know it’s Christmas,” the secretive effort to organize USA for Africa’s contribution to the cause brought 46 of the top recording artists together in Richie’s Lion’s Share studios in Los Angeles. Again, the details of this event are painstakingly, breathlessly, fawningly captured in photographs, videos, and glossy articles. Quincy Jones thought Cyndi Lauper was a pain in the ass and said her jewelry “was fucking up every take.” Bob Dylan was nervous about his voice. Waylon Jennings walked out. Michael Jackson staged a photo of himself drinking Bruce Springsteen’s Budweiser. Huey Lewis sang Prince’s line because Prince no-showed. Diana Ross offered half her sandwich to a crew member. Bob Geldof was there, introduced by Quincy Jones as “really the inspiration for this whole thing.” Geldof delivered desultory details of his recent time in Africa, asking everyone there to keep in mind “the price of a life this year is a piece of plastic seven inches wide with a hole in the middle and that, I think, is an indictment of us.” He calls the famine a crime, namely that “the western world has billions of tons of grain bursting its silos and we’re not releasing it to people who are dying of hunger.”
But then he also went on to say, “I don’t know if we in particular can conceive of nothing, but…nothing is not having any drink to get drunk on.” Maybe not the best example to illustrate the suffering in camps in the Tigray region.

But is the song a good song? It is catchy. The lyrics aren’t great but some of the solos are: Bruce Springsteen erupts onto the song and the section where he harmonizes with Stevie Wonder is electric; the harmonizing between Diana Ross and Michael Jackson is diaphanous and ethereal. Cyndi Lauper’s vocalization as she takes her solo, “whoa whoa yeah,” feels like her voice is barely able to brake before colliding head-on with our ears.
In his 1985 takedown, “Number One with a Bullet,” Greil Marcus wrote, “I had to admit that as a tune ‘We Are the World’ isn’t at all bad—but a more vague composition about specific suffering could not be imagined.”
According to Revolution guitarist Wendy Melvoin, Prince skipped the recording session because “he felt like the song for ‘We Are the World’ was horrible.” Quincy Jones dished that Cyndi Lauper hated the song. And Bob Dylan said, “People buying a song and the money going to starving people in Africa…is a worthwhile idea but I wasn't so convinced about the message of the song. To tell you the truth, I don't think people can save themselves.”
“We’re saving our own lives” is one of a few polysemous lines in the song. (In an early draft, the line was “we’re taking our own lives,” which was understandably reworked for being too dark.) It might mean by saving the lives of others we also save our own as a sort of selfish action couched as altruism. It might mean I am the other; we are the world. To save him/her/them is to save myself because we are one and the same. Perhaps as Dylan understood it, the song could be in the voice of the children of the BBC report on the famine. “We are the children” and “we’re saving our own lives.”
Perhaps in support of that reading, Michael Jackson wrote in Moonwalk, “Since first writing it, I had thought that song should be sung by children,” saying he cried when he heard this version in particular. “It’s the best version I’ve heard.”
Things that haven’t aged well: Michael Jackson and the innocence of children.

Lyrically, it’s not only vague but unoriginal. “The greatest gift they’ll get this year is life,” Boy George sings with Band Aid. “To life, the greatest gift of all,” Paul Simon sings with USA for Africa. “Feed the world,” the Band Aid ensemble sings. “We are the world,” the USA for Africa ensemble sings.
And, like Geldof’s attempt to explain nothing to popstars, the song offers weak platitudes in the face of the crisis. “When you’re down and out and there seems no hope at all,” Michael Jackson sings on the bridge; Huey Lewis continues, “If you just believe, there’s no way we can fall.” Down and out in Ethiopia? Just believe? In what? In life, the greatest gift of all? Or that God will turn stones to bread (a line Willie Nelson sings that has no referent in the Bible)?

The official video for the song is the recording session, this all-nighter where, as LIFE put it, “a highly pedigreed group of singing multimillionaires have come together with one goal: to help Africa’s starving.”
Not seen at any point during the seven minute video: Ethiopians.
It may seem this cause needed a group of singing multimillionaires to take on the voice of the children; maybe Ethiopians could not call attention to their own suffering as effectively. Or maybe our mass media society just made it harder to hear someone like Erte Tekle, who was in Los Angeles trying to raise awareness at the time, than Kenny Loggins or Dionne Warwick.

But is it a good song as a hit, as a work of heart, as a work of international aid?
If the song is to be measured for its status as a hit, it clearly succeeded: it made the Billboard top 20, above Stevie Wonder’s “Part Time Lover,” Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” and Richie’s “Penny Lover,” as well as singles by Tina Turner, Diana Ross, and others on the track.
If the song is to be measured for its mission, it might be said to have succeeded: just as USA for Africa was inspired by Band Aid, other charitable singles were inspired by “We Are the World,” maybe most notably “That’s What Friends are For” on behalf of AIDS research. It helped to inspire Farm Aid. And like Richie’s call for a Covid version, there was “We Are the World 25 for Haiti” to raise money after the 2010 earthquake. That featured its own kind of “multi-celebrity car crash”: Wyclef Jean, Justin Beiber, Miley Cyrus, Adam Levine, Snoop Dogg, Tony Bennet, an autotuned Lil Wayne, and many more, including Kanye West, who rapped, “Feels like the world’s end, we could make the world win.” (Things that haven’t aged well: Ye.) And although he had just recently died, Michael Jackson’s vocals from the first recording were included, too. It was executive produced by Richie and, like the first, produced by Quincy Jones. In fact, it was recorded in the same place and similarly after a gathering for a musical awards show, this time the Grammys. Unlike the first, though a lot like Imagine, it was widely mocked. Maybe the best of which was the SNL sketch about the recording of “We Are the World 3: Raising Awareness of the We Are the World 2 Disaster.”
Oh, and Lionel Richie did in fact bring back “We Are the World” in 2020, a couple months after the 35th anniversary, as the finale to American Idol, on which he’s served as a judge for several seasons. This time—and I had to get the list from People, because most of these names mean nothing to me—the solos and ensemble were from the illustrious American Idol ranks: judges Katy Perry and Luke Bryan, the Top 11 from that season of the show, and a string of “Idol alumni.”
But if the song is to be measured for its effectiveness in saving lives, well…

3: There are people dying

Let’s go back to that BBC report. Let’s consider this seven-minute video. “Dawn,” Michael Buerke’s report begins, “and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem,” a town in the Tigray region, “it lights up a Biblical famine--now, in the 20th century.” In this instance, the specific suffering is not vague but rather quite graphic. There are images in this video not only of starving people and wailing grief but of bodies in burial shrouds and even the body of a three-year-old girl, shown partially uncovered. Perhaps this reportage is or risks becoming famine porn, as was said almost a decade later of “The Struggling Girl,” the haunting, Pulitzer-winning photograph by Kevin Carter of Kong Nyong in Sudan. And (arguably aestheticized) images of the Ethiopian famine would win Stan Grossfield the Pulitzer in 1985, too, like the famous “Mother and Child” image:

So, we have to ask whether the song effectively conveys the horror and suffering of a million real people. As Marcus points out in his piece, the most direct the song gets about the details above is “there are people dying.” For all the song suggests, the nature of this famine is ex nihilo and the resolution is “it’s time to lend a hand” by us in the west. Or, that is, we, the world. But the famine was not without its geopolitical and very human causes. In “Famine and Forced Relocations in Ethiopia 1984-86,” part of the Speaking Out series of case studies by Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors without Borders), they pinpoint the causes of the famine as “the combined effects of a two-year long drought” and government policy. And as Tehila Sasson writes in “Ethiopia, 1983–1985: Famine and the Paradoxes of Humanitarian Aid,” the famine followed decades of civil war and “the representation of the famine in [western media] depoliticized the conflict rather than discussing its political and economic causes,” which were “officially ascribed to drought, but as aid experts and human rights advocates have shown, it [the famine] was in large part created by government policies.” This media desire to depoliticize the famine was tied up in complications with postcolonialism and the Cold War, too. Read in a Cold War context, or a postcolonial context, “We Are the World” takes on a markedly different inflection.
I’m not in much better a place to tell you the political history of 80s Ethiopia than Bob Geldof, but to try highlighting a couple pieces: the country was then ruled by a military leader, a communist-leaning military leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam, who was instrumental in the executions of his competitors to Ethiopian leadership and who was later convicted of genocide for his role in the Qey Shibir, or Ethiopia’s Red Terror. Not long after Voice of America participated in playing“We Are the World” simultaneously around the globe, Ethiopia became the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia under Mengistu’s leadership, which is to say a Leninist state.
So the real human suffering was exacerbated or inflicted by real humans, too. And who benefited from the aid? Did the millions of US dollars raised by selling seven-inch pieces of plastic, indeed, “help Africa’s starving?”
MSF review the history of “Do They Know it’s Christmas” and “We Are the World” and Live Aid as, “The spirit of solidarity aroused by media coverage of the catastrophe made it possible to raise an unprecedented amount of international aid” but “the Ethiopian regime diverted a portion of that aid, to carry out forced population transfers from rebel areas [from the north to the south] where the population could be more easily controlled.” As they describe it, farmers and others in rural Ethiopia headed to distribution centers, “where they were loaded onto trucks, often requisitioned from aid organisations, and transported like livestock.” Six months after the release of “We Are the World,” three months after Live Aid, MSF publicly denounced the government for impeding their efforts and misallocating aid; MSF was expelled from Ethiopia. Most other aid organizations were silent on these issues, but some “criticised MSF’s position, which they described as ‘political.’ Bob Geldof, founder and spokesperson for Band Aid and the organiser of the ‘concert of the century’ for Ethiopia, agreed with them.”
Sasson covers the same unsettling connection between aid and forced resettlement, but also notes, “international assistance undoubtedly prolonged the Mengistu government’s life.” And it was not only Mengistu who converted international aid to political violence; rebels reportedly sold food aid to buy weapons. Though Bob Geldof has argued otherwise, recent reports seem to confirm this.
But that’s 1985. What does Ethiopia look like now? Was there a lasting impact of the aid? Did selling millions of singles change the direction of a nation of people?
Well, you may be aware Ethiopia is in the midst of another multiyear drought and more war in the Tigray region. The UN Secretary General's October 2022 statement on the conflict ended with, “The international community must rally together now for peace in Ethiopia.” Or, that is, “There comes a time when we must heed a certain call to come together as one.”
What if we brought back “We Are the World” as Richie suggested but not for a new mission, a new catastrophe, but for the reprise of the same one? Raise money again for Ethiopia. Sure, streaming may have replaced the piece of plastic seven inches wide with a hole in the middle. Sure, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Kendrick Lamar may not have the same overwhelming international superstardom to be taken seriously (might seem like their covert narcissism is disguised as altruism); then again, if Taylor Swift can overwhelm Ticketmaster…

4: We can’t go on pretending day by day

And so what does “We Are the World” mean?
Watching the “all star lineup” of American Idols covering the song while projected onto empty New York City streets and Niagara Falls it is clear it is an anthem that, by being vague about specific suffering, can be repurposed for emotional effect without clearly saying anything. But I want to allow Gal Gadot to be able to mean it. I think I want her and Lionel Richie to be capable of sincerity. I look at the response to “Imagine” and the way SNL mocked “We Are the World” with “We Are the World 2” and I wonder whether our internetted irony is what won’t allow Vince Vaughn to try to raise money for earthquake victims or a singing Sarah Silverman to lift the spirits of a nation in isolation. Is this why we can’t bring back “We Are the World?” Is this why we can’t have nice things?
Why can’t a collection of celebrities convert their cultural and economic power to charity? To international good? Is it the saviorist posture? Is it the tone-deaf, doesn’t-age-well imagery of the very rich and famous attempting and failing to understand the suffering of others, to grasp, as Bob Geldof noted, what it truly means to have nothing? Or is it that capitalism and the conviction that it can solve the world’s problems is, in fact, the actual problem?
Greil Marcus wrote, “‘We Are the World’ is a great commercial,” connecting it to the 1985 Pepsi commercial starring Lionel Richie that aired at the Grammys. Noting the similarity between “There’s a choice we’re making” and “The Choice of a New Generation,” as well as the fact that both Jackson and Richie were paid Pepsi spokespersons, Marcus says, “within the realm of contextualized geopolitical economics, those Ethiopians who survive may end up not merely alive, but drinking Pepsi instead of Coke.” Okay so one way of thinking about this is that “We Are the World” is a paean to capitalism; that that’s why the music video is of the superstars singing their solos and why LIFE detailed the minute-by-minute behind-the-scenes of the recording session like it was the first meeting of Reagan and Gorbachev (several months after “We Are the World”); that, in fact, that’s the We. This self-congratulatory song is about western, capitalist beneficence saving the world—saving the poor, hungry masses huddled under the iron fist of pre-Leninist states, to get specific. This commodified notion of humanitarian giving thus is a commercial but not for Thriller or Born in the USA, not even for Pepsi; it’s a commercial for free market liberalism. There are people dying. There’s a choice we’re making. Or maybe, as Richie also sang that year, “We made our choice, making it Pepsi.”

Or is the We us, just you and me?
Because isn’t that the thing, that we are the world, that we are the ones—shouldn’t this have been the message, might this have been a meaning—that instead of spending our money on the seven inch piece of plastic Geldof talks about we could make a change, a brighter future, we could be the ones to live for others, to spend our efforts on erasing food insecurity worldwide, of just seeing, truly, that “we are all a part of God’s great big family?”
Because what would it look like if this sentiment—let’s start giving—were not a one-hit thing, not repeated at quarter-century intervals (with decreasing returns) but instead were a choice we make to turn away from capitalism and pop celebrity? A pop song can be a one hit wonder but an aid effort, a mission to save lives, is just as indictable if done only once as Geldof charged: we in the west have billions of pop albums bursting the silos and people are going hungry. It’s making me a little sad, a little angry, maybe, this one-hit worldview.
But anyway maybe I’m taking this whole thing too seriously. Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe it’s a self-serious song by a manchild in a rhinestone glove whose vision of suffering in an African country was as empirical as a hummed note in a closet, as abstract as the nonsense refrain he suggested adding to the song because it sounded African to him: sha-la, sha-lin-gay.
When Michael Jackson proposed that African-ish refrain, it led to a brief creative conflict among the many stars. Stevie Wonder got a friend to give him a phrase in Swahili, an actual language, though not the one spoken in Ethiopia. Bob Geldof worried people—that is, real people, for example in Korem—would feel they were being mocked. It went back and forth. Al Jarreau and Cyndi Lauper suggested a new refrain, saying, “We can make a meaning!” After more workshopping, theirs made it onto the single: “One world, our children.” But in the midst of all this back and forth, eagerly documented by LIFE, Tina Turner begrudged the loss of Jackson’s African-sounding chorus, saying, “I like sha-lum better—who cares what it means?”

Michael Sheehan lives, teaches, and writes in Western New York. His copy of “We Are the World” was inherited from his aunt, or rather salvaged from a plastic bin of scratched albums and battered covers, and basically represents her entire musical taste. Inside the jacket, USA for Africa detail why they exist (“we can’t not try”) and what you can do. Among other options, the LP includes an order card for commemorative products: the book, the cassette, buttons, pins, a poster, and the official sweatshirt from the recording session, the purchase of which “will help feed an African child for almost a month,” an asterisked claim clarified as meant “only to illustrate how much good can be done.”

jessica handler on “someday, someway”

Stop what you’re doing right now and cue this baby up. It will only take about three minutes of your time, the length of a standard radio pop hit. Because that’s what it is. A power-pop hit.
Now that you’re listening, you’re dancing a little, right? Maybe nodding along or tapping your fingers, because this is so catchy that you can’t not. Yep. Same here. That’s the magic of power pop. You might be a little embarrassed, because your taste normally goes elsewhere (sure, of course it does), but look at you, digging it.
Granted, I’ve given you a link to Marshall Crenshaw’s performance of “Someday, Someway” on a 1982 episode of the David Letterman show, so it’s from the universe of big hair and shoulder pads. Crenshaw’s performance swings, but Letterman’s approach is cringeworthy. He has the same “what are those crazy kids up to now?” grimace that Sullivan had introducing The Beatles to a television audience nearly two decades prior. Never mind the host, though, because Crenshaw’s trio gives it their all. Before the second verse, Crenshaw turns to grin at his band. He closes out the number with a thumbs up to the studio audience. Take that, Dave.
Crenshaw’s earnest, clear vocals ride above Chris Donato’s gleeful, melodic bass line (mixed super-high on the Letterman performance, less so on the album.) The drummer, Crenshaw’s brother Robert, drives the song in the way that the best drummers do; you think it’s simple until you (okay, me) sit down at your kit and try it yourself. And how much fun is a song with hand claps? (Very.) When Crenshaw sings, “I can't stand to see you sad, I can't bear to hear you cry” we hold in our hearts the idea of someone we love saying those very words to us.
The lyrics are a plea for connection, for being desperate to do it right. Crenshaw explained in a 2013 PBS interview that the song is about “the beginnings of marriage, [when] you realize you’ve signed up for something permanent.”
The first time “Someday, Someway,” knocked me out was in 1982, when it was a radio hit. I didn’t see the Letterman appearance at the time (I found that for you while writing this essay, so you’re welcome.) Power-pop gets me where I live. Consider The Beatles as Exhibit A in the power-pop pantheon. They started out playing skiffle, then got famous with power pop, then went psychedelic, then went their own ways. Power pop for the win.
“Someday, Someway” reached the #36 spot on the Billboard chart in August of 1982, and stayed on that chart for eleven weeks. In September, the song was above the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me?” and below Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” on the Cashbox Top 100 singles. Crenshaw, who had just left two years of performing as John Lennon in the stage show Beatlemania (feel free to start connecting the thematic dots here) later said of “Someday, Someway” that the song meant something to him.
He got lucky. Rockabilly monster Robert Gordon recorded a cover that, Crenshaw notes in that same PBS interview, “got a lot of airplay.” And Crenshaw’s original, released after the Gordon cover, got a lot of airplay, too.
I prefer Crenshaw’s version; it just feels better.
We have to talk about rockabilly for a minute here. Would a listener comprehend the genetic makeup of “Someday, Someway” if they didn’t already have Buddy Holly or Gene Vincent in their soul? Does it matter? Fundamentally, no. A wise-ass music nerd (waves hand from the back of the classroom) feels smarter, more equipped somehow, to get the song, but a good song is at its heart just a good song. I wonder, though, if “Someday, Someway” resonates differently if you already have rockabilly in your system. You know, the jittery, chittery feel, and Holly’s ‘hiccup’ vocal style? Crenshaw played Buddy Holly — sounding wonderfully like Marshall Crenshaw — in the 1987 film La Bamba (keep connecting those dots.) “Someday, Someway” is, structurally, Crenshaw’s homage to “Lotta Lovin’” by Gene Vincent. And The Beatles, of course, started life as the leather-jacketed, greasy-pompadoured Quarrymen. (How are those dots coming along?) No less an expert than Billy Bragg, in his authoritative book, “Roots, Radicals, and Rockers” calls skiffle and rockabilly “exact contemporaries.”
Someone told me once that when a person hears a pop song, they either imagine themselves singing it or imagine themselves the person to whom the song is being sung. With “Someday, Someway,” which one am I? Depends on the day. I contain multitudes.
I was twenty-two when I first heard “Someday, Someway.” My twenties were ostensibly a time of big fun, of sometimes pretending to have big fun, and definitely an ongoing quest for big fun (how else do I explain the late nights and early mornings at the Cathay de Grande club in the seediest part of seedy Hollywood, or the backyard parties where at least one friend wore coconut shell halves as a brassiere? There is, however, no good explanation for my owning more than a single pair of winklepickers.) My twenties, and likely yours, too, were secretly a search for that permanence, for someone who “will love you for my whole life through.”
And that’s the power in the pop of Marshall Crenshaw’s “Someday, Someway.” Singing it or being sung to, maybe it understands you.

Jessica Handler is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize and a nominee for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. The novel is one of the 2019 “Books All Georgians Should Read,” an Indie Next pick, Wall Street Journal Spring 2019 pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 2019 pick, and a Southern Independent Bookseller’s Association “Okra Pick.” Her memoir, Invisible Sisters, was also named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read,” and her craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss was praised by Vanity Fair magazine. Her writing has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Electric Literature, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Oldster, Full Grown People, and March Plaidness. She lives in Atlanta, and is the 2023 Ferrol A. Sams Jr., Distinguished Writer in Residence at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.