Acadiana journalist and political poet Dominick Cross has been named editor of the Pulitzer Prize winning Delta Democrat Times in Greenville, Mississippi. Familiar to local readers for his music and culture column, In Tune, in the Monday, Acadiana Section of The Advocate, Cross is continuing a 30 year career that began as a copy boy at the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va. Over the years he has covered sports, news, music and culture in papers from Telluride, Colorado to Crowley.
The Delta Democrat Times was launched in 1938 by Hodding Carter, a former reporter for the New Orleans Item-Tribune (an ancestor of The Times-Picayune). Carter was an outspoken champion of social and economic tolerance in the Deep South long before the civil-rights era. The paper won a Pulitzer in 1946 for Carter’s editorials denouncing the treatment of Japanese-American soldiers returning from World War II. The Delta Democrat Times has a long proud history of independence in an area that is considered a bastion of old South politics, and Cross says he intends to follow in the footsteps of Carter, continuing to work for social justice. He’s also excited, he says, to be located in the heart of Mississippi Delta blues country.