Willie Drye

Willie Drye (born October 22, 1949) is an American journalist and author. He has published three nonfiction books, and is a contributing editor for National Geographic News. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail of Toronto, and other national and regional publications.

Early life and education
Drye was born in on October 22, 1949 in Albemarle, North Carolina.

He credits his sixth-grade teacher at Richfield School, with sparking his interest in historical research and storytelling. He participated in athletics at North Stanly High School, and won a local award for sports writing for the student newspaper in 1967. He also was a volunteer firefighter for the Richfield-Misenheimer Volunteer Fire Department before graduating from North Stanly in 1968.

Drye attended Mitchell College (now Mitchell Community College) in Statesville, North Carolina, and later joined the US Army to serve as a medic.

After receiving an honorable discharge, he attended Belmont Abbey College in Belmont, North Carolina for one semester to earn credits needed for admission to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Matthew McSorley, a professor of English at Belmont Abbey, encouraged Drye to develop his writing skills. At the University of North Carolina, Drye studied under Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Philip Meyer, and later became a close friend of the late Jim Shumaker, a journalist and instructor at the School of Journalism. These two instructors greatly influenced Drye's later work. Drye also was encouraged to pursue a career in journalism by Mark MacDonald, who was city editor of The Chapel Hill News at the time. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from UNC in 1981.

Journalism
Drye worked as a reporter and later as managing editor for The News of Orange County in Hillsborough, North Carolina; the Macon (Georgia) Telegraph; the News and Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina; and the Stuart (Florida) News. Drye was working as a reporter in South Florida when Hurricane Andrew made landfall near Miami in August 1992, at which point he began researching hurricanes. Drye married Jane E. Morrow, PhD, in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1992.

In 1995, Drye wrote a letter to Mickey Mantle when he learned that the baseball player was dying of cancer. Drye's letter was chosen for Letters to Mickey, a collection of 109 letters from Mantle's fans written to him after his diagnosis was publicly announced. The book was published by HarperCollins in 1995. Drye later became a contributing writer for FoxSportsBiz.com, a website produced by Fox News that focused on the business side of college and professional sports.

Following the publication of his first book, Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, Drye began writing about hurricanes and other topics for National Geographic News. In 2005, Drye was invited to write an in-depth article about the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 for Tequesta, the scholarly journal of the Historical Association of Southern Florida.

That same year, Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 was the basis for a two-hour (with commercials) documentary film, “Nature’s Fury: Storm of the Century” produced for the History Channel by Towers Productions of Chicago. Drye is the primary narrator in the film, which premiered in 2006.

In August 2005, Drye wrote for National Geographic's extensive coverage of Hurricane Katrina with a series of stories for National Geographic News that examined the storm's immediate effects. In the aftermath of Katrina, Drye was asked to write about Katrina's unprecedented devastation and the political fallout in the wake of that hurricane for The Washington Post and the History News Network.

In 2006, Drye was hired by Key West Magazine to write about how Key West and the Florida Keys could be affected by a major hurricane. Those stories won a first place Charlie Award for Public Service from the Florida Magazine Association in 2007. That same year, Drye was recognized for his work by the General Alumni Association of the University of North Carolina.

Drye currently produces a blog, Drye Goods, about topics of personal interest such as baseball, the Civil War, hurricanes, and popular culture. He is a frequent guest on radio talk shows in WLRN in Miami, WUNC in Chapel Hill, and other stations. He lives with his wife in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Books
Drye's first book, Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, was published by National Geographic Books in August 2002. The book, a work of narrative nonfiction, tells the story of the most powerful hurricane in US history, which struck the Upper Florida Keys on September 2, 1935, during the depths of the Great Depression. The storm's 200 mph winds and 20-foot storm surge killed more than 400, including about 260 World War I veterans working on a New Deal construction project building a highway between Miami and Key West. A political storm followed the hurricane when WPA administrators were blamed for not getting the veterans off the low-lying islands before the storm struck.

Storm of the Century was well received by reviewers, who mentioned Drye's description of the Keys in the early 20th century and his portrayal of the storm's power.

Through both his work for National Geographic News and Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 Drye's work has been cited in scientific studies of hurricanes and their effects on society,    legal briefs,   and local emergency management plans.

Drye was a consultant for author Jennifer Holm when she was writing Turtle in Paradise, a children's novel set in the Labor Day hurricane of 1935. After the book was published in 2010, it became a Newbery Honor Book and won the Golden Kite Award.

Drye's second book, Images of America: Plymouth and Washington County, was published by Arcadia Publishing in 2014. The book uses pictures to depict the history of a region in northeastern North Carolina.

His third book, For Sale—American Paradise: How Our Nation Was Sold an Impossible Dream in Florida, was published by Lyons Press in 2015 and tells the story of the Florida Land Boom of the 1920s. The book received positive reviews, including Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist, The Florida Times-Union, and others. In 2016, the book won a Silver Medal for Best Nonfiction- Southeast Region, from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (also known as the IPPY Awards)