Chris Myers Asch is the co-author, with G. Derek Musgrove, of Chocolate City: A History Race and Democracy in Our Nation’s Capital. Published by the University of North Carolina Press, it was praised as “an epic history of politics and power in Washington, D.C.” by Kate Masur.
His previous book, The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer, was published by the New Press. The book was honored with the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians, the McLemore Prize, from the Mississippi Historical Society, and the Mississippi Authors Award in Nonfiction.
After graduating summa cum laude from Duke University in 1994, Chris joined Teach for America, a national program that recruits college graduates and places them in school districts that are chronically short of teachers. He was sent to Sunflower, Mississippi, where he taught elementary school for three years. After a year with the Fulbright program in South Korea, he entered graduate school at the University of North Carolina, earning a doctorate in American History in 2005. Chris currently teaches history at Colby College and runs the non-profit Capital Area New Mainers Project.