The DAILY YONDER

1415 Alameda Dr.
Austin, TX 78704
512-428-9067

Editors:
Bill Bishop bill.bishop@dailyyonder.com
Julie Ardery julie.ardery@dailyyonder.com

The Daily Yonder brings issues and images of the rural U.S. to the fore. We welcome readers from all over to see what's working, failing or never been tried in small communities.

Have opinions to air, anecdotes to share, beefs to chew? Please Speak Your Piece (we'll post pronto) or send us your views via email. Contribute your photos of real rurality (no more rusty tractors!) to the Daily Yonder flickr site.

"Yonder" points to a lot of territory, more ground than we can cover. So let us know what's happening where you are and what you'd like to see here. Send a news tip and we'll send you a Daily Yonder bandana.

STAFF

Publisher
Dee Davis
President, Center for Rural Strategies
Whitesburg, KY
dee@ruralstrategies.org

Co-editors
Bill Bishop and Julie Ardery
Austin, TX
bill.bishop@dailyyonder.com
julie.ardery@dailyyonder.com

Research
Tim Murphy
Palm Beach, Florida

Associate Editor
Tim Marema
Knoxville, TN
tim@ruralstrategies.org

Photo Editor
Shawn Poynter
Knoxville, TN
shawn@ruralstrategies.org

Promotions
Chavvah Lister
Knoxville, TN
chavvah@ruralstrategies.org

Accounting
Teresa Collins
Whitesburg, KY
teresa@ruralstrategies.org

Contributing Writers
Douglas Burns (Iowa)
Julianne Couch (Wyoming)
Richard Oswald (Missouri)
Mary Annette Pember (Ohio)

Dee Davis is president and founder of the Center for Rural Strategies, which publishes the Daily Yonder. He is the former executive producer of Appalshop, the Appalachian media arts and education center. While Dee was at Appalshop, the organization produced more than 50 documentary films and videos, including "Belinda," which received an Alfred A. Dupont/Columbia University Award for journalism excellence. Dee is chairperson of the steering committee of the National Rural Assembly and a member of the national advisory board of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. Dee holds an English degree from the University of Kentucky.

Bill Bishop is co-editor of the Daily Yonder. Bill is the author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of America is Tearing Us Apart (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2008), which examines political segregation and social segmentation. He was a writer on the special projects team at the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman and associate editor and columnist for the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader. Bishop has worked as a reporter at The Mountain Eagle, a weekly newspaper in the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky, served in several political campaigns and spent five years as a free-lance writer specializing in the coal industry. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing in 1989 and won the Gerald Loeb Award for commentary on business and economics in 1996 and was a finalist in 1998. Bill is a graduate of Duke University.

Julie Ardery is co-editor of the Daily Yonder. In the 1980s, she and her husband, Bill Bishop, edited and published the Bastrop County Times, a weekly paper in Smithville, Texas. She is the author of the book The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and the Genesis of Twentieth Century Folk Art (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and has written on art and culture for newspapers, magazines and academic journals. She also directs "The Human Flower Project," an international archive of floral news, science and customs. Julie holds a Masters in English from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Kentucky.

Tim Marema is vice president of the Center for Rural Strategies and associate editor of the Daily Yonder. He began his print journalism career at the weekly Berea (Ky.) Citizen as part of Berea College's student labor program. He went on to help found the Chapel Hill (North Carolina) Herald, a daily edition of the Herald-Sun of Durham. He served as editor of the newspaper for five years before joining Appalshop as development director in 1992. Tim holds a master's in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Julianne Couch is a freelance writer from Wyoming. Her essays and articles have appeared in Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers; High Country News, Owen Wister Review, Heritage of the Great Plains, Hard Ground: Writing the Rockies, Ahead of Their Time: Wyoming Voices for the Wilderness, Peaks & Plains and other publications. She is the editor of the University of Wyoming’s alumni publication, Alumnews, and co-hosts a literary talk show on a community radio station in Laramie. She is the author of the travel memoir Jukeboxes & Jackalopes: A Wyoming Bar Journey (2007). The sequel, Jukeboxes & Jackalopes: The Photographic Companion, is forthcoming from the Wyoming State Historical Society. She holds a master's degree in English from Emporia (Kan.) State University.

You can keep up with Julianne by following her on Twitter.

Richard Oswald is a writer and farmer from northwest Missouri. Aside from his “Letters from Langdon” column for the Daily Yonder, he also writes a weekly column for DTN Grains Edition titled “View from the Cab,” opinion pieces for Organization for Competitive Markets Newsletter, and local Missouri news for Missouri Farmers Union’s quarterly. Richard and his wife, Linda, have raised their family and made a living on their land, some of which has been in the family for five generations. With his son Brandon, he grows seed soybeans, food corn, and cattle.

Mary Annette Pember is an independent journalist whose work focuses on American Indian issues and culture. An enrolled member of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe, she worked as a staff photojournalist and photo editor at newspapers in Green Bay, Wisc., Phoenix, Ariz., Portland, Ore., and Lexington, Ky. She began her freelance career 10 years ago, successfully combining writing with her photography. Past president of the Native American Journalists Association, her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Discovery Channel Online, The Progressive Magazine, Rise Up Magazine, The National Museum of the American Indian, and others. She is the winner of several state and national journalism awards and is a recent recipient of The Justice and Journalism grant from USC Annenburg. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, with her husband and two children. Her website has other examples of her work.