I was originally born in Gretna, La., and was only 5 when my family moved to Atoka, Tenn. We moved to Horn Lake, Miss., while I was in middle school and stayed there until my freshman year of high school, when we moved to Brandon, Miss., where I've lived ever since. I spent two years at Hinds Community College in Pearl before enrolling at the University of Southern Mississippi, where I received a bachelor's degree in English in 2010.
For the first year or so after graduating from college I was searching around for a good job to make use of my degree. I caught a lucky break when Donna Ladd went to an orthodontist appointment at an office where my mother was working at the time. My mother learned that Donna was a newspaper editor and told her about me and my job hunt while they had her lying on the chair getting ready to start. Soon, Donna reached out to me and offered me a position as an intern for the Jackson Free Press, which I accepted. Since then, I have grown into my current position of web editor.
I'm primarily responsible for managing the Jackson Free Press' main website and posting all our content, from stories to photo galleries or landing pages. I also put together and ship out our daily newsletter each day, write our weekly Biz and Higher Ed roundups, and interview one person a week for our Person of the Day feature. On top of that, I'm responsible for posting content for our BOOM! Jackson website.
My biggest hobby is video games, as I have owned just about every recent console at some point. Fantasy and RPGs have long been my favorite genre, which I heavily attribute to getting obsessed with "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter" during high school. I've also been a huge anime fan since middle school and was even vice president of the USM Anime Club while I was there.
Back in 2015, Donna assigned me my first-ever cover story for the JFP, which came as a surprise. Even more surprising was the subject, a jiu-jitsu program at Wingfield High School in Jackson. I ended up spending hours at a time at Wingfield talking to the Thrashers and the students and learning more about jiu-jitsu than I ever thought I would. Humorously, after that story came out, I had martial-arts studios all over the Jackson metro contacting me for months afterward, wanting me to feature them. Somehow, I ended up becoming "The Jiu-jitsu Guy" at the JFP for some time after that.
