For more than past 25 years, the Roanoke Times has featured well-written, substantial stories by Beth Macy. As she writes on her website, “Intrepid Paper Girl,” her beat has encompassed “a displaced furniture factory worker, a veteran with PTSD and a group of Somali Bantu refugees who are finally getting outside the public housing apartment they’ve been stuck in for five years — and doing what they loved before the war tore their lives apart: digging in the dirt.”

For a sample of her excellent work, read Macy’s last article for the paper.  Macy has made news herself with the publication of “Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local—and Helped Save an American Town.”

The book emerged from her Roanoke Times reporting on Virginia’s Bassett family and John Bassett III, who, in her words, “gave cheap imports from China the middle finger and kept his Galax factory workers employed.” It came out last July 15 from Little, Brown and Co., having already won the J. Anthony Lukas Book-in-Progress Prize in 2013 from the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism for “excellence in nonfiction that exemplif[ies] the literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the work of the awards’ Pulitzer Prize-winning namesake.”

The book also drew a strong review from The New York Times, in its May 22, 2014, survey of summer reading: “Early warning.”  Janet Maslin wrote,“ ‘Factory Man’ . . . is an illuminating, deeply patriotic David vs. Goliath book. They give out awards for this kind of thing.”

Awards and recognition are rolling in: Macy is a finalist for the Library of Virginia’s People’s Choice Award at its 2015 Virginia Literary Festival; and she’s sold ‘Factory Man’ rights to Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman’s Playtone. Saving American jobs in the face of outsourcing is one of the U. S.’s biggest economic stories of the 21st century; now it will get a personal treatment as a result of the work by a Virginia woman.

A Virginian since 1989, a journalist since the age of four (by her reckoning), an engaging speaker (judging by this WVTF interview of June 6, 2014), and a stellar writer, Beth Macy makes a worthy Newsmaker of the Year for VPC.

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