Reporter for Alabama Media Group. My work is published on AL.com, and in print in The Huntsville Times, The Birmingham News and the Mobile Press-Register.
@acvollers
www.annaclairevollers.com
Anna Claire Vollers
reporter
Huntsville, Ala.
Reporter for Alabama Media Group. My work is published on AL.com, and in print in The Huntsville Times, The Birmingham News and the Mobile Press-Register.
@acvollers
www.annaclairevollers.com
An overall improvement in infant mortality rates in Alabama may appear as welcome news, but there are troubling findings within recent state health reports. The gap between infant mortality rates for black and white babies in Alabama is huge - and it's growing. Black babies in Alabama died at three times the rate of white babies in 2015, the most recent year for which data is available.
Story of the Year 2017 - Alabama Press Association
Lucas Greenfield was prepared to scale the razor-wire topped fence surrounding Restoration Youth Academy if it meant his freedom.
While an instructor was busy, Greenfield seized his chance. He was nearly out the door when another student ratted him out. His punishment for the attempted escape was "isolation," an empty 8x8 room lit by a lone bulb that burned overhead day and night.
It was a bad morning. After months of work, Ashley Sparks had finally gotten her 5-year-old daughter Brinley to a point where she could put her pajamas into the laundry basket every morning before getting dressed. It sounds like a simple thing. For Brinley, though, even simple jobs can be frustrating to the point of tears.
AL.com, The Huntsville Times, The Birmingham News, Press-Register (Mobile)
The day before Sommer Curry was scheduled to deliver her baby in early September last year, she got in her car and drove to the hospital. "Really, there are no other options," said the mom of three, who lives with her husband and children in Camden, Ala., located in rural Wilcox County. "I guess we've gotten used to it.
AL.com, The Huntsville Times, The Birmingham News, Press-Register (Mobile)
HAZEL GREEN, Alabama – Around 1 a.m. on May 10, 2012, Jeremy Hays sent his new bride a text. He’d married Anna just five weeks before, in Huntsville, surrounded by family and friends.Jeremy was in Memphis because his job sent...
With this article (published both in The Huntsville Times and on AL.com) I won second place for Best Feature Story Coverage from the Alabama Press Association in 2014.
This article made it to #3 of the top stories sitewide on AL.com.
To understand Congressman Mo Brooks, it's helpful to understand the man he almost became. In the early 1970s, Brooks was a student at Grissom High School in Huntsville, Ala. It was the final days of the Space Race and his father had moved the family from South Carolina to take an electrical engineering job on Redstone Arsenal.
Jessica Thompson didn't take her eyes off the glowing dashboard clock as her husband sped their minivan through the night, heading north on a deserted country highway somewhere in Lauderdale County. The contractions were two minutes apart now, on the dot. She tried to focus on breathing. It was just after 4 a.m. on a mild April morning.
She pumped her breastmilk in the locker room at the police station. Shirt askew, horn-shaped pump parts - technically called breastshields - held up to the breasts while a pump hums loudly, using suction to express breastmilk into small bottles. Pumping breastmilk is worthwhile, but it isn't particularly dignified.
Court-ordered school integration efforts are rare these days. School desegregation peaked in the late 1980s and federal judges have released hundreds of school districts across the South from court-enforced integration over the past 15 years. "We need to be out from under a desegregation order," said Mary Scott Hunter, a member of the Alabama State Board of Education who has three children at Blossomwood Elementary.
Mike* is the kind of precocious kid you often find in literature but rarely meet in real life – almost adult-like in his mannerisms and speech, talking knowledgably about current events and complicated social issues. When I met him last week, we bonded over a shared love of vanilla lattes and traditional-style church worship services.
A personal column for Al.com and The Huntsville Times.
"The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is a dim, hushed space, but it isn’t peaceful, exactly. A constant chorus of low beeps and bells does the talking for fragile babies resting in incubators and warmers. It’s a place where diapers are the size of credit cards, and..."
The cover of Spark Magazine's April-May 2012 issue - The Southern Issue, and my editor's letter.
*The link includes a teaser video I created for this issue.