Meet John…

John W. Bateman writes and looks for stories from the Deep South. His work has appeared in places like The Chicago Tribune, The New Southern Fugitives, Electric Literature, Facing South, The Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, and on the silver screen. He has a not-so-secret addiction to glitter and, contrary to his southern roots, does NOT like sweet tea. His first novel, Who Killed Buster Sparkle? (Unsolicited Press) was a 2020 Nominee in Fiction by the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters and recipient of the 2019 Screencraft Cinematic Book Award. John received his MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a 2023 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow. He is currently a 2023-24 Watson Brown Fellow in the Southern Studies Fellowship in Arts & Letters.

Although he misses his unicorn lumberjack shack, John is living somewhere near the third star to the left.

Current projects…

According to the Local News Initiative, there has been a net loss of nearly 2,900 newspapers in the U.S. from 2005 to 2023. More than 200 counties have no local media source and more than 1500 have one: roughly half of the United States landscape. How does this affect the South? The rest of the nation? One theory poses that a lack of local information contributes to the growing division of “us” and “them.”

In my Southern Studies Fellowship in Arts & Letters, I am exploring access to information, the control of narratives, and the way the public receives and consumes information. Some questions I’m exploring include:

• How does access to information impact communities? How is the public’s access, consumption, and understanding of news and information influenced?

• What narratives do we believe? What narratives do we tell ourselves?