Linda Quigley bio

In the Summarium, a newspaper you’ve never heard of published at a north Alabama elementary school that no longer exists, Linda Quigley, then 11 years old, had her first byline in May 1960. In the next decade or so, she wrote for every student newspaper and local weekly in that little Tennessee River town, earned a bachelor’s degree in English at the University of North Alabama and a master’s in journalism at Penn State University. In her 30 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, she interviewed hundreds of famous people, from President Jimmy Carter to First Lady Tipper Gore to basketball superstar Kareem Abdul Jabar to French cooking guru Julia Child to NAACP leader Kweisi Mfume and a whole lot of writers, painters, musicians, hairdressers, mountain climbers, gardeners, undertakers, soldiers and moms and dads in between. They all had a story to tell.

As a reporter, she says, you tell people’s stories the best you can. Sometimes their story has been told a hundred times before and you have to find something different. Sometimes it’s the only time anyone will ever tell it, the only time a person’s name will ever be in the newspaper until they die. Even in an ever-changing media world, the day when you can publicly dignify one human being by telling their story to an audience of readers is as important as anything else you’ll ever do.

Now she’s in her seventh year on the media studies faculty at Belmont University. She hopes somebody she teaches this year, or next year or the next, will have as much fun as she did chasing those stories.