Rick Bragg, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper feature writing in 1996, will give a free public lecture Thursday, April 14, at Johnson City’s Millennium Centre.
ETSU presents “An Evening with Rick Bragg” at 7:30 p.m., followed by a book-signing.
A native of North Alabama, Bragg says he learned to tell stories by listening to the masters, the people of the foothills of the Appalachians.
“They talked of sadness, poverty, cruelty, kindness, hope, hopelessness, faith, anger, and joy of their everyday lives, and painted pictures on the very haze of the early evening, when work faded into storytelling,” Bragg said.
Bragg’s first book, All Over But the Shoutin’, was a bestseller. It recounts the life of the author’s mother, who absorbed the cruelties of an alcoholic husband haunted by his service in the Korean War, and showed how she struggled, in endless cotton fields, to make a living for her three sons.
Bragg followed that book with Ava’s Man, the tale of a whiskey maker, poacher, roofer, and folk legend who was his mother’s father, the grandfather Bragg never knew. It, too, was a national bestseller.
After working at several newspapers across the South, Bragg joined The New York Times in 1994.
He covered the murder and unrest in Haiti, the Oklahoma City bombing, the school killings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Susan Smith’s trial for the killing of her children in South Carolina, while he was a national correspondent based in Atlanta.
Just in time for the international battle over Cuban Elian Gonzalez, Bragg was named Miami Bureau Chief for The Times. He later became a roving correspondent based in New Orleans.
Bragg has twice won the prestigious American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award, in addition to more than 50 other writing awards during his 20-year career. In 1992, he became a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, under the direction of ETSU alumnus Bill Kovach, then curator of the Nieman Foundation.
Bragg left The Times in 2003 and wrote a best-selling biography of West Virginian Jessica Lynch. The book I am a Soldier, Too describes her dramatic capture and rescue in Iraq.
Bragg is also the author of Somebody Told Me, a critically acclaimed collection of his newspaper stories.
“An Evening with Rick Bragg” is part of the 20th anniversary celebration of ETSU’s Center for Appalachian Studies and Services. The event is co-sponsored by the ETSU Chapter of The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi and the ETSU Office of University Relations. For more information, call 439-4317.

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