Beth Macy M.A. ’93, a Roanoke-based journalist and the author of three New York Times-bestselling books, has been selected as the Hollins University Commencement Speaker for the university’s 183rd Commencement on Sunday, May 18, 2025, at 10 a.m. at Berglund Center Coliseum in downtown Roanoke, Va.
Macy writes about outsiders and underdogs. Raised poor in a small Ohio community, Macy examines rural communities left behind by corporate greed and political indifference. Her first book, Factory Man, explored the aftermath of globalization and won a J. Anthony Lukas Prize. Dopesick was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal, won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Science and Technology, and was described as a “masterwork of narrative nonfiction” by The New York Times. The book wasmade into an Emmy- and Peabody-winning television series that Macy co-wrote and executive produced.
Her 2022 book, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis, was a follow-up to Dopesick and explored on-the-ground solutions to the nation’s drug epidemic. Macy’s next book, PAPER GIRL: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, is forthcoming by Penguin Press in October. It is combination memoir and reported examination of the rural-urban divide told through the lenses of declining upward mobility, political polarization, and the decimation of local and regional news.
Macy’s awards include a 2010 Nieman Fellow for Journalism at Harvard and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. She has also written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post.