Beth Macy

Meet Beth Macy

Democratic Candidate For Congress

Beth Macy never planned on entering politics. She grew up poor in a small Ohio town, the first in her family to go to college, and built her adult life in Roanoke, where she and her husband raised two kids on a reporter’s and a teacher’s salary. For 25 years at The Roanoke Times, Beth covered the stories of people and communities across western Virginia, listening without judgment and digging for the truth even when it was uncomfortable.

As a best-selling author, Beth earned national recognition for her deeply reported books about families, work, opportunity, and the forces shaping life in rural America. Her first book, Factory Man, chronicled how globalization reshaped small towns. Her book Dopesick exposed how opioid executives preyed on vulnerable communities and fought to conceal the damage they caused. The book helped shift America’s understanding of addiction and was turned into an Emmy- and Peabody-winning Hulu series she helped produce and write. Her latest book, Paper Girl, continues her lifelong work of telling honest stories about home, struggle, and what it means to build a better future.

Throughout her career, Beth has stood with outsiders and underdogs, and she has seen firsthand how the system has devolved to benefit billionaires over working families. She has listened to parents who lost children to addiction, workers whose jobs disappeared, and communities forced to fight for basic services like child care, health care, and mental health treatment. She has watched families across the 6th District work harder than ever while falling further behind because the people in power have become more beholden to corporations than to the communities that elected them.