Grace Elizabeth Hale is a writer and historian specializing in twentieth century American culture and the regional history of the South.  She is the author of In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning, Cool Town, A Nation of Outsiders, and Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South.  Her essays and op eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, CNN Opinion, and The American Scholar.  She also writes regularly about photography and other forms of visual art for museum catalogs and photo books and in her series Shutter, published by Southern Cultures.  Her new project, They Don’t Own Us: Harlan County, Kentucky and the Past and Future of American Workers, tells the dramatic story of how working-class people in the late 1960s and 1970s built a mostly forgotten interracial movement to reform unions and empower American workers. Hale narrates what the grassroots fight against the economic, political, and cultural changes that scholars call neoliberalism looked like from the perspective of working-class Americans.

Hale teaches history and American Studies at the University of Virginia.  The winner of a 2025 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and a former Carnegie Fellow, Hale has also held major fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Institute for Historical Studies, and Virginia Humanities.