Mark Warren, a September Writer-in-Residence at the Hemingway House with The Community Library, joins us for a conversation with author and journalist Kim Cross about his Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writing piece, “A Death in Alabama.” The article is an eye-opening narrative about a big event in a small Alabama town: The death of Bubba Copeland, a Baptist pastor and local mayor who ended his life after his private life was exposed by a right-wing media site.

Mark will discuss the unexpected story behind the article, about earning trust as an outsider in a small town, about avoiding assumptions, and the power of telling stories in the wake of tragedy.

Mark Warren worked as an editor at Esquire Magazine for twenty-eight years, twenty of those years as Executive Editor, where he oversaw much of the award-winning narrative nonfiction literary journalism for the magazine. He then spent six years as Vice President and Executive Editor at Random House. During his decades in book and magazine publishing, he has covered Capitol Hill and the White House, and initiated enterprise reporting on race, poverty, geopolitics, technology, political extremism, domestic and international terrorism, gun violence, and the health-care system, among many other subjects. He coauthored Senator Harry Reid’s memoir “The Good Fight” when Reid was Senate Majority Leader, as well as Senator Jeff Flake’s book “Conscience of a Conservative,” which was published in 2017.