Doug Hunt

Doug Hunt is a resident of Columbia, Missouri, and student of the city's past and its present. In 2010 his work was recognized with the Richard J. Margolis Award, given annually "journalist or essayist whose work combines warmth, humor, wisdom and concern with social justice." His essay on the 1923 lynching of James Scott was listed as "notable" in Best American Essays for 2004. His essay on the 1833-34 struggle of the slave named Sanford to win his freedom was a finalist for in the Missouri Review's editor's prize competition for 2011.

He is an admirer of John McPhee, Tracey Kidder, Melissa Fay Greene, and other nonfiction writers who respect (and even enjoy) hard facts, but who enter imaginatively into the lives of the people they write about. His aim is to combine a historian's accuracy with a novelist's sense of story and character.