Joseph P. Stinnett is the retired editor of The News & Advance and the Roanoke Times. He spent the first several years after he retired building an off-the grid cabin and working in the woods. Not really a Thoreau situation, this was an old farm that needed tending. At the same time he began reading, studying and writing about colonization in Virginia, while publishing freelance pieces on topics ranging from William Faulkner and Peter Matthiessen to the survival of Sweet Briar College and an early Black educator. His history of the hundreds of people from Lynchburg and Piedmont Virginia who emigrated to Liberia before and just after the Civil War, Out of Virginia: The Black American Search for Freedom in Nineteenth Century Liberia, will be published in March 2026 by the University of Virginia Press Rivanna imprint. He graduated from UVa where he majored in English because he thought a history major would involve too much writing, but then immediately went to work as a reporter. He is a husband, father, and grandfather, and a mountain hiker who also enjoys listening to music, reading fiction and non-fiction, and taking photographs.