Rising Stars: Meet Chris Joyner

Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris Joyner.

Hi Chris, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I backed into my journalism career. My academic training was in American history with degrees from the University of West Georgia and the University of Southern Mississippi. After a year at the University of Connecticut, I was ready for something new and applied for an open reporting job at the Times-Georgian in Carrollton. I had lived in the city as an undergrad and both of my parents attended West Georgia, so the surrounding were familiar. It was during that time that my father gave me the tip about the death of Carl “Buddy” Stevens Jr., a young man shot to death on Halloween night 1948. As far as my father could recall, the crime was never solved. I started looking into the case and was hooked, not just on the story of Buddy’s death but that also on the legal drama that followed and the massive social changes that were happening in Carrollton and the United States in the period after World War II.

I spent nights and weekends researching the case, but then I got another newspaper job in another city. Another job and another move followed and then another. I spent the next decade reporting in Georgia, Tennessee and Mississippi for local newspapers as well as reporting for USA TODAY and some one-off stories for wire services. Along the way, I reported on crooked politicians, environmental disasters, street gangs and spent six months on the Gulf Coast reporting on the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

In 2010, I returned to Georgia to join the investigations team at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, concentrating on state government and politics. But it was several more years before I reached into the back of a closet and pulled out the carefully organized notebooks of research I had done nearly 20 years earlier on the Stevens murder and the trials of a Black sharecropper named Clarence Henderson who was wrongly accused in the death.

Once again I was hooked, and once again I was spending nights and weekends deep in the evidence surrounding a 70-year-old cold case. The result of that work is “The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson,”  published in January by Abrams Press (https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/three-death-sentences-of-clarence-henderson_9781419756368/#) a book that tells the story of Stevens’s death and Henderson’s fight for freedom while also illustrating the themes in politics, culture and race that dominated the next 70 years of American history.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
I’ve been very fortunate in my career, although it was not a sure thing when I started. I never wrote a newspaper story in my life before I was hired for my first job. I brought my master’s thesis (on the development of the Blues music industry) as my only writing sample. Most of my colleagues had been to journalism school and had interned at newspapers while in college, so I had to learn the craft on the fly. My decision to write my first book was a similar case of on-the-job training. I knew I wanted to publish through a traditional publisher rather than self-publish, but that meant writing a book proposal, finding an agent and then getting a contract with a publishing house. I took it on like I had when I started in newspapers — asking authors out for coffee, reading books and articles about the industry, attending conferences. Again, I was fortunate. I got my book proposal in front of the right person, my current agent, and together we found a good home for the book with Abrams Press.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
At the AJC, I specialize in political investigation, campaign finance, and since 2015, extremist groups. The latter has kept me busy in recent years as I have tracked neo-Nazi terror cells, antigovernment militias, and wild conspiracy theories with an eye on their impact on our political health. On the side, I spent time in libraries, courthouse, archives, even the Library of Congress as I researched and wrote “The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson.” It’s been a blast — sometimes a bleary-eyed, not-enough-sleep blast, but a blast nonetheless.

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Although, I’ve certainly been fortunate to have worked with some great journalists in my career and my association with them has made me better.

Pricing:

• $25 for the book

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ajc.com/staff/chris-joyner/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AJCChrisJoyner
• Twitter: @cjoyner
• Other: https://www.abramsbooks.com/contributor/chris-joyner_33515291/

Image Credits
Photo of author by Kathleen Greeson