Former Mountain Xpress Editor Awarded Research Grant

may 18, 2010  11:29 am
Jon Elliston, former managing editor of Mountain Xpress in Asheville, N.C., has received the backing of a John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation research grant for his book on the civil-rights era attacks on Camp Summerlane, a biracial children's camp in the North Carolina mountains. Elliston left the paper last month in order to pursue the book full-time, a project which evolved from a series of articles he wrote for Xpress in 2008. When the stories first appeared, Elliston wrote that the series would “explore why and how it was that incensed adults from a tranquil mountain town laid siege to a camp full of children.” Two years later, he tells his former paper that he intends to use the grant to delve into the Kennedy Library’s Justice Department records of the attack.