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.

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.

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.