Monica Potts (1979–)

Arkansas native Monica Potts is an award-winning journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, published in 2023. Her work has appeared in such publications as American Prospect, the Atlantic, the Nation, the New Republic, New York magazine, the New York Times, Texas Observer, and Vogue. She has also reported for National Public Radio (NPR) and the ABC News website FiveThirtyEight. For her coverage of poverty in Appalachia, she won the Sidney Award in 2012 from New York’s Sidney Hillman Foundation, which honors excellence in journalism.

Monica Potts was born in Clinton (Van Buren County) in 1980 to plumber Billy Potts and homemaker Kathy Potts, along with younger sisters Ashley and Courtney. When she was growing up, the Potts family lived briefly in Shirley (Van Buren County) while her father worked construction in the development of Fairfield Bay (Cleburne and Van Buren counties). They then returned to Clinton, a town of about 2,500.

In The Forgotten Girls, Potts says that her mother “lived in terror that her daughters would get stuck in Clinton” where there were few options for a different kind of life outside early marriage and motherhood. Potts noticed the early deaths in towns like hers among young women, often called “deaths of despair,” or the scourge of MOSS: methamphetamines, opiates, smoking, and suicide. She says that she and her mother focused on school “as a vehicle for leaving Clinton.”

During her sophomore year of high school, Potts’s standardized test scores earned her a grant to a summer program at Barnard College in New York City. That school had been recommended by her mother because she had read on book jackets that a college called something like “Brinnaw” was “where all the women writers go.” After graduation in 1998 from Clinton High School, where she gave the valedictory address, Potts attended prestigious Bryn Mawr College, a private women’s college in Pennsylvania (and the one her mother had actually been trying to think of). Bryn Mawr offered a major financial aid package for low-income students through work study and scholarships, which her high school guidance counselor had known nothing about.

Although her younger sister Ashley died in a car wreck two weeks before the college semester began, Monica flourished at Bryn Mawr, graduating with a BA in anthropology in 2002. She soon got a job in the newsroom at the New York Times before going on to write for other major publications. She received an MS from the graduate school of journalism at New York’s Columbia University.

Along with the Sidney Award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation in 2012, Potts was the 2013 recipient of the David Pike Award from Street Sense Media, in honor of reporting that changed perceptions about homelessness. She was also named a 2016 Fellow of New America, an organization dedicated to realizing the promise of America in an era of rapid technological and social change.

Potts’s articles include “The American Social Safety Net Does Not Exist” (the Nation); “Street Harassment Is Universal and Age-Old” and “Why Don’t We Believe Women Who Say They Have Been Raped?” (both Vogue); and “Democracy Is a Top Concern for Many Voters. We Asked Them Why,” “Issues, Not Candidates, Are Motivating Young Voters,” “Will the Maine Shooting Change Public Opinion on Guns?” and “Yes, Party Conventions Matter” (all for ABC News).

In 2017, Potts moved back to Clinton from the suburb of Washington DC where she had been living. She told the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin that she “started to feel at home in Clinton again” due to things she loved there such as “the wildness, the mountains, the rivers, [and] some of the culture.” In 2023, she published The Forgotten Girls, an account of her experience reconnecting with a high school friend who had remained in Clinton. Potts is a senior politics reporter for the ABC News website FiveThirtyEight.

For additional information:
Detrow, Scott. “White Women in Rural American Are Dying. This Memoir Examines Why.” All Things Considered, NPR, April 19, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/04/19/1170919543/white-women-in-rural-america-are-dying-this-memoir-examines-why (accessed December 11, 2024).

Monica Potts. https://www.monicapotts.com/ (accessed December 11, 2024).

“Monica Potts.” ABC News. https://amp.abcnews.com/author/monica_potts (accessed December 11, 2024).

“Monica Potts.” The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/authors/monica-potts/ (accessed December 11, 2024).

“Monica Potts.” Vogue. https://www.vogue.com/contributor/monica-potts (accessed December 11, 2024).

Potts, Monica. The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America. New York: Random House, 2023.

Nancy Hendricks
Garland County Historical Society