Jim Auchmutey
WRITER OF THE YEAR
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

For months, chilling recent developments in the 1913 lynching of Atlanta's Leo Frank had nurtured in the mind of Jim Auchmutey. "I got a call from someone who claimed to know who had lynched Frank and he did, sort of," Auchmutey said.

"He had found a list of some of the lynchers at an archive. The first thing I did was take it to the great-niece of Mary Phagan, the little girl Frank was convicted of killing. "As it turned out, it was a spooky time to visit her. I interviewed her on the anniversary of the lynching. She gave me directions to the site.

"It was the last light of day when I pulled up. I read the plaque and tried to imagine when it was a farm and there was an oak tree there, and a man was hanging from it."

This is the second Cox Writer of the Year award in the last five years for the feature writer who has defined his craft in Atlanta. He also won Cox's top prize in 1997.

Auchmutey's output is prodigious and with his dry wit he frequently enters the realm of the unexpected, as in last year's "The Roadkill Cookoff — rattlesnake, possum, squirrel. mmmmm."

"There was quite a lot of reaction to that story," he said. "Other newspapers followed up. People from England and Germany called the person who runs that contest. National Public Radio did a feature on it." How did a story idea come to him about people who cook and eat food that has been killed on the South's highways?

"I used to write 'Tasting the South' for the Sunday Dixie Living section and checked around for food features or restaurants to write about," he said. "I found out about that festival. It somehow never seemed appropriate for a series called 'Tasting the South.' "

An Atlanta native and graduate of Georgia State University, Auchmutey has been an associate editor of Presbyterian Survey magazine; AJC general assignment writer; editor of Dixie Living; assistant features editor; and a staff writer again. "I have spent time at editing both here and at the church magazine, and I think that has helped me," he said. "I do know what the other side is like, and how to get something into the paper."

His wife, Pam, is an editor at Emory University.