Bio
Candy Hatcher, a native of North Carolina, has been a reporter, editor, columnist and editorial writer for daily newspapers in the South, the Northwest, Midwest and Florida.
She’s written about three crashes of commercial airliners, covered umpteen hurricanes (including Hugo and Andrew), and specialized in stories about troubled teens. Once while in Florida, she followed Chessie the manatee up the East Coast to Rhode Island, chronicling his unusual journey to tourist hotspots. In Seattle, she had the best job in the world, a series called Evergreen Journal that explored the people, places and issues of Washington state.
Candy spent a dozen years writing for The Palm Beach Post and 10 years as an editor and editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. In between, she was a reporter and metro columnist for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and an editor at The Chicago Tribune. She started her career at the Burlington (N.C.) Daily Times-News and then moved to the Wilmington (N.C.) Star-News. Most recently, she was senior editor of The Island Packet in Beaufort County, S.C., until her retirement in 2022.
Candy holds a bachelor of arts degree in English from Wake Forest University and a master of science in journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She has won awards from the American Bar Association, the National Education Writers Association, the Society for Professional Journalists and various state press associations.
She lives in Beaufort, S.C., with her artist husband and their pointer/lab. Sometimes, when she’s feeling especially grateful or particularly ticked off, she writes “#5things” about the little things that make her smile.