March 29, 2024

Meet Phoebe

In May, armed with nothing but a ham and swiss croissant from the farmers’ market and a Tom Wolfe quote painted on her mortar board, Phoebe Marie Brannock faced college graduation and the future that lay beyond it. As she left the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., she had yet to find a job or decide on a city, but a few short months later, she discovered a job posting for a media company in Iowa, interviewed and accepted the position as your new weekly paper reporter.

A whirlwind of telephone calls and Google searches later, Brannock left Staunton, Va., the gem of a town in the Shenandoah Valley, to move to Newton. She already misses her two Australian shepherds, Beau and Rogue, Dukes mayonnaise and views of the Appalachain mountains, but she is eager to discover everything this corner of the country has to offer.

When she isn’t writing or working on her blog — POSH: Etiquette for young people, by young people — you can find her scouring the shelves of a library for a good book, taking a morning run or throwing together a batch of her mother’s pimento cheese and baking fluffy buttermilk biscuits. She dreams of the day when she can collect passport stamps like charms, and she has a soft spot for Scotland, where she spent a college semester studying at the University of St. Andrews and devouring scones.

Phoebe Marie has written for the William & Mary Alumni Magazine and its blog, The Gale, and she has served as an opinion intern for Education Week in Bethesda, Md., where she wrote for its Bookmarks blog and edited and commissioned pieces covering K-12 policy and practice. Brannock started writing in 2015, when she ran a food blog for William & Mary’s student newspaper, The Flat Hat.