About the candidate
I’ve spent my career building things and not waiting for permission.
I’ve worked at big corporations like MTV and small legendary companies like Ardent Studios. I’ve lived in Memphis, New York City, Denver, Austin, and Nashville. Some of my best work I built from nothing on my own. The rest of the time, I was the person inside the company figuring out how to stay ahead of the game.
The work
Thirty years of making things that weren’t there before.
I started a blog called Rachelandthecity in 2003, back when “blogger” wasn’t a job - it won the Memphis Flyer’s Best Blog three years running. I wrote a music column for the Commercial Appeal. I helped Ardent Studios figure out the internet before “social media manager” was a phrase. I helped launch a record label, ran publicity for Big Star, started two podcasts heard by hundreds of thousands of people, and spoke on panels at SXSW, CMJ, and AmericanaFest. In 2013 I built Make Memphis - a website where anyone in the city could pitch ideas to fix it - and organized 13,000 people around it. In 2019 I started my own PR agency and never chased a single client in six years; all of it came by referral.
A little more
Two things worth knowing.
On September 11, 2001, I was living two blocks from the World Trade Center, and what I watched that morning has never left me. And since 2021, I’ve lived in a travel trailer - I sold everything, traded the Prius for a pickup, and started covering ground. It’s how I’ll campaign across all 17 counties of this district: on the road, in person.
Why I’m running
Because no one is addressing the real problem - a system that no longer serves its citizens.
I started writing about politics seriously after January 6th, and five years later nothing’s better. The same promises get made every cycle - healthcare, wages, housing - and nothing moves, because the people in office benefit from it not moving. And now Republicans have redistricted Tennessee to hold on to power in Washington. So I filed to run for Congress in the newly-redrawn 5th District - as a Democrat, as a disruptor, on six specific things that have to get fixed first. All six are on the homepage.
That’s the short version.
The six fights are on the homepage. The writing is on Substack. The money will be on the finance page, in real time. Pick where to start.