Telling the stories you want to hear
Maya Miller is stepping into a new role as community engagement reporter for the Gulf States Newsroom
I love a good drive. From where I live in rural Mississippi, I kind of have to — it takes me about 15 minutes to get to the nearest grocery store. It’s even farther to my favorite bookstore, which pains me. But I’ve never really needed a reason to get behind the wheel of my beat-up Camry and take a long drive at dawn, or on my lunch break, or when the sun is low in the sky and casting deep oranges over the Barnett Reservoir.
Now, I’ll be spending a lot more time on the road, driving across Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama in my new role as the Gulf States Newsroom’s Community Engagement Reporter. I want to know what you love most about your communities, what drives you, and what you envision for the future. What issues persist after national attention fades? Do you have questions about your community that have never been answered? This is what will fuel my reporting.
In the last year with the Gulf States Newsroom, I’ve traveled hundreds of miles across the region telling stories of efforts to restore or dismantle reproductive rights. At the root of my reporting has always been the guiding question of whose hands are elbow-deep in the work.
When rural hospitals began to shutter their doors across Mississippi, I reported on an emergency services program that hopes to provide care for those babies left behind. In Clarksdale, where the teen pregnancy rate is one of the highest, I visited a class that teaches young mothers how to raise their babies.
But my reporting also took me into demolished church sanctuaries and onto sun-soaked porches during times when locals sought answers to the ever-changing world around them.
When the entire city of Jackson was without clean, running water for nearly a month, I visited business owners who were trying to stay afloat. After a tornado ripped across Mississippi into Alabama, killing dozens of people, I drove into town and documented the devastation, but also the resilience there. Those small communities jumped into action for one another, even from across state lines. And when President Joe Biden designated a national memorial for Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley, I spent a few scorching days in the Mississippi Delta with historians who’ve been championing this work for years.
As a lifelong Mississippian, I’m familiar with the way Southern stories have the ability to shape perception. These stories with hardworking Southerners at the forefront have the most impact on who I am, not only as a reporter but as a fellow Southerner who loves her home state. Change in the region has been slow to arrive, but there are folks on the ground making sense of their lives, finding solutions where it feels like there are none and searching for someone to share their story with.
As Community Engagement Reporter, my mission will be to travel across the region and bring these stories to you. I’ll find answers to your questions about what’s going on in your state, and hopefully introduce you to the various hands doing the work and the movements that shape our daily lives. I’ll directly respond to events as they change the communities you live in. I’ll also be checking in to hear what you’re interested in knowing more about and what stories you feel are worthy of telling. I won’t always be able to publish every story idea you submit, but I’m here to make connections and bridge paths between your communities across the South.
For my first assignment, I’ll be in Birmingham, covering the 60th anniversary of the 16th Street Bombing which killed four young girls and ignited a wave of civil rights action across the South. You can follow my travels on Instagram, where I’ll be posting from the road.
If you have a question about the region that you’d love an answer to, or if you have a story you think should be known, email me here, or drop a line in my DMs on Twitter.
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