I grew up the child of an engineer and computer scientist in the booming suburbs of Huntsville, Alabama, but I was always more interested in stories about my grandfathers—union members at US Steel in Birmingham—than in rockets or astronauts.

In 1999, I left Alabama for the University of Iowa, where I studied labor and working-class history with Shelton Stromquist and joined my first union, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 896, also known as the Campaign to Organize Graduate students (COGS).

During my time at Iowa, I learned what it meant to be a union steward and to guide a local union as part of a coordinating committee (our version of an executive board). I was also fortunate to be a UE delegate to three international gatherings of union members from around the world to support the struggles of public-sector workers in Mexico, Canada, Japan, and the United States.

In 2007, I came home to Alabama to put my training to work as an editorial consultant with the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI), a museum, archive, and community center dedicated to carrying on the work of Birmingham’s civil rights activists from the 1950s and 1960s. While at the BCRI, I worked with the director of the institute’s oral history project, Horace Huntley, to produce Foot Soldiers for Democracy, a volume of oral histories with veterans of the city’s desegregation campaign of 1963.

In 2013, I returned to Iowa as an oral historian at the University of Iowa Labor Center. Over the course of a decade, I crisscrossed Iowa and the US recording hundreds of interviews for the Iowa Labor History Oral Project (ILHOP), an almost fifty-year-old oral history collaboration founded by the Iowa labor movement.

During these years, I won a series of grants and other awards to support this work. They included an Archie Green Fellowship from the Library of Congress to collect interviews and photographs from recent immigrant and refugee meatpacking workers in the Midwest, and an over $190,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to transcribe and index new ILHOP interviews.

In addition to my historical work, I supported a range of activities at the center as part of its de facto communications staff. I received and responded to media requests, supported earned media relations, and took photos and videos of educational programs and actions in coordination with our partners in the labor movement.

I collaborated with AFL-CIO communications staff to document conventions, picket lines, and protests across the state, including the highly publicized strike by UAW members at John Deere in 2021, and I supported documentation of SEIU 1199NE’s innovative contract campaign in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. During these years, I also began producing a long-form documentary podcast, Speaking of Work, and short, NPR-style audio programs to support marches and picket line activities across Iowa.

In addition, since 2017, I have developed my skills in non-profit programming as president of the Iowa Labor History Society. In this capacity, I have helped develop the organization’s successful fundraising and outreach capacities, including support for National History Day projects, production of materials for K-12 schools, curation of a traveling exhibit based on the ILHOP interviews, and a successful film screening series in Des Moines and Iowa City.

In 2023, I left the Labor Center to pursue more direct advocacy work as a union representative with the Iowa State Education Association, but I have continued my scholarship, teaching, and creative work through my newsletter (also called The Extra Board) and as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Iowa. My contract services include oral history interviewing, photography, videography, and related consultation and support services (including equipment rental).

Thank you for your visit to my website, and I look forward to seeing how we can work together to tell your stories.

In Solidarity,
John