Ted Genoways, a University of Tulsa president’s professor and the editor of Switchyard magazine, is one of five authors to receive a Watchdog Writers Group fellowship from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. The fellowships are designed to allow journalists to write a book while helping mentor a student reporter and come with an annual stipend of at least $50,000 for two years.
“It’s such an honor to be included in the amazing community of Watchdog Writers. The best reporters and nonfiction writers in America have been – and are – participants in this program. The financial support is practically helpful, but it’s the insight and advice that the cohort will provide that I’m looking forward to most,” Genoways said.
The Watchdog Writers Group is a nonprofit journalism fellowship program and teaching lab. Established in 2019, the program has a two-fold mission: to provide financial support to authors as they write a deeply reported nonfiction book in the public interest while simultaneously training the next generation of young reporters. The stipend is designed to assist fellows as they step away from their day jobs to conduct the type of time-consuming, onerous reporting that falls through the cracks in over-stressed newsrooms.
Genoways, a two-time James Beard Award winner and author, has written six books, including “Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico.” He currently teaches media studies courses in UTulsa’s Kendall College of Arts & Sciences.
During his fellowship, he will work on his new book, “The Kill Floor: Big Meat and the Future of America,” which will track the demographic shifts in several meatpacking towns and chart the concurrent rise in white nationalism in those communities. His research will examine how U.S. immigration raids led the meatpacking industry to shift away from undocumented labor toward recruiting and hiring refugees.
“All of the participants – the fellows, the reporters running the fellowship, the students working alongside us – are top-flight and so welcoming and supportive,” Genoways said. “Reporting and writing can be lonely work. The Watchdog Writers Group goes a long way toward making the work feel more collaborative and valued.”
As part of the program, he will serve as mentor to Missouri graduate student Bryan Chou, who will report on the legal fallout from years of immigration raids.