Alan Huffman

Alan Huffman is an American freelance journalist, photographer, editor, author, and political opposition researcher. He is the author of five nonfiction books: Ten Point, Mississippi in Africa, Sultana, We’re With Nobody (with Michael Rejebian), and Here I Am. He edited or co-edited three, including Lines Were Drawn (2016).

Alan Huffman was born in Bolton, Mississippi. He received a BA degree from Ole Miss. A partner in the political research firm Huffman & Rejebian, Alan has been a farmer, newspaper reporter, and aide to a Mississippi attorney general and a Mississippi governor.

After a brief stint as a political aide, he returned to journalism and began conducting political opposition research. Huffman contributed to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the New York Times, Smithsonian magazine, and other publications.

His first book, Ten Point: Deer Camp in the Mississippi Delta (1997), is a photo essay exploring decades of the Issaquena County wilderness in the Mississippi Delta. Huffman wrote the text as a setting for photographs by his grandmother Florence Huffman.

Mississippi in Africa (2004) recounts the saga of 200 freed Mississippi slaves who sailed to Liberia before the American Civil War to become part of a new American-African colony.

Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History (2009) is a survival story set during and after the American Civil War.

We’re With Nobody: Two Insiders Reveal the Dark Side of American Politics (2012), co-authored with Michael Rejebian, is an irreverent insider’s view of the opposition research industry, called “oppo” in political circles and dirt-digging elsewhere.

Here I Am (2013) is a biography of photojournalist Tim Hetherington. It was released simultaneously with Sebastian Junger’s documentary film for HBO about Hetherington and his work, Which Way is the Frontline from Here?

In 2016, the University Press of Mississippi published Lines Were Drawn: Remembering Court-Ordered Integration at a Mississippi High School. The book was a collaboration of Alan Huffman, Teena Horn, and John Griffin Jones, graduates of Jackson's Murrah High School, class of 1973. It contains contributions from more than 60 students, teachers, and school administrators.

The authors described a "social experiment" that they thought would lead to the unification of races through the desegregation of schools in Mississippi in the 1970s. But in many places, including Jackson, it did not happen.

Huffman has also taught at the following institutions: Millsaps College; Mount Holyoke; Oakley School of Education; Putney School; University of Mississippi.

Alan Huffman is now still living in Bolton. He moved the Holly Grove Plantation House from Port Gibson, Mississippi, to Bolton in 1990. The home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Photo credit: alanhuffman.com