Debra Hale-Shelton

Debra Hale-Shelton is a veteran, award-winninng journalist who previously was a reporter and briefly an opinion columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, where she twice received the Arkansas Press Association's I.F. Stone Award for investigative journalism. In 2017, the American Journalism Historians Association named her Journalist of the Year. She also has worked as a reporter and editor for The Associated Press, mostly in Chicago but also in Little Rock, Atlanta and Kentucky. Hale-Shelton has interviewed past and future presidents, death-row inmates, and more than a few people who spoke on condition of anonymity. For 6 1/2 years, she taught English at Earle, Arkansas, where she helped students start a school newspaper, The Bulldog Express.