Charlyne Mattox
Charlyne Mattox blends food, gardening, and crafts into practical, seasonal service stories that show readers how to cook, grow, and make things for a comfortable home. She is the Food and Crafts director at Country Living and brings more than 20 years of recipe development, recipe editing, and crafting experience to the masthead. Her work spans recipes, outdoor how‑tos, and DIY projects, unified by clear, step‑by‑step guidance and an emphasis on everyday usefulness.
Seasonal Recipes and Entertaining
Mattox’s food coverage focuses on approachable recipes organized around seasons, holidays, and common home occasions. She develops menus and collections that help readers plan specific gatherings, from Labor Day feasts to weeknight dinners and cold‑weather get‑togethers.
Recent work includes a Pumpkin Margarita designed as a festive fall cocktail, easy ground beef recipes for weeknight dinners, and pork chop recipes tailored to busy evenings.
She also curates seasonal spreads, such as Labor Day recipes for an end‑of‑summer send‑off and side dishes for summer cookouts, including Fourth of July gatherings. Within those collections, she writes detailed recipes for staples and crowd‑pleasers - homemade French fries with multiple dips, creamy onion dip, and an old‑fashioned apple cake positioned as a centerpiece for September parties. Her archives further show roundups like five recipes to make after a weekend of apple‑picking, linking home cooking directly to seasonal rituals and pantry realities.
Home Gardening and Outdoor How‑Tos
A defining feature of Mattox’s beat is the depth of her gardening and outdoor coverage alongside food, with service pieces that translate horticultural know‑how into simple jobs and checklists. She writes regularly about flower and bulb care, including guides on how to plant tulip bulbs in fall for spring blooms, how to grow asters for autumn color, and how to choose and care for mums so they thrive through the season. Her lawn and weed stories take the same practical tone, explaining when to stop mowing before winter, how to control weeds in fall for fewer problems in spring, and how to turn fall leaves into “garden gold.”
She also covers bird‑friendly yards and backyard wildlife, with pieces on keeping hummingbirds visiting through fall, understanding whether hummingbirds sleep at night, and when to take down hummingbird feeders. As part of a Garden Club newsletter series, she writes about vegetable gardening, companion planting, and specific tricks such as growing potatoes, connecting food production directly to home cooking.
Across these articles she breaks work into discrete tasks - fall weed jobs, tomato watering mistakes to avoid, summer flower lists, and July garden chores - so readers can match limited time to the most impactful jobs in the garden.
Hands‑On Crafts and Seasonal Decor
Mattox’s crafts coverage sits alongside her food and gardening work and focuses on simple, achievable projects that refresh the home with each season. Her author bio and masthead role emphasize a long tenure in crafting, and her archive includes DIY wreaths to give a front door a classic fall makeover and pumpkin decorating ideas ahead of Halloween.
These pieces frame crafting as an extension of the seasonal home, pairing decor with the rhythms of gardening and entertaining rather than treating it as a standalone hobby. Instructions tend to be direct and materials‑driven, reflecting her broader experience in craft departments and long‑term work developing projects for home magazines.
Service Guides and Editorial Voice
Mattox’s work is strongly service‑oriented, and several first‑person features show how she tests and refines advice before presenting it. In “I’m a Garden Editor - These Are the Only 6 Chores I’m Doing This July,” she narrows the gardening to‑do list to a handful of essential jobs, explaining why each task matters and how to execute it efficiently in hot weather.
In a detailed piece on cleaning rusty garden tools with vinegar, she documents buying inexpensive rusty shears, soaking them, and restoring them, turning a common maintenance problem into a replicable method with clear time frames and follow‑up steps. Her Garden Club newsletter installment on vegetable gardening mixes editorial framing, expert consultation, and her own kitchen and farm background, ending with a tomato juice martini that ties gardening back to recipes. Across these stories she writes in a concise, instructional style, often organizing information into lists of mistakes to avoid, jobs to prioritize, or plants to choose.
Her broader career includes extensive recipe and craft editing, work in crafts departments at major lifestyle outlets, formal culinary training, a cookbook on cooking with seeds, and a nomination for a James Beard media award while working as a senior editor, all of which underpin the authority of her current service coverage.
Taken together, Mattox’s work is distinguished by its cross‑disciplinary blend of food, gardening, and crafts, its strong seasonal framing, and its commitment to practical detail backed by long editorial and culinary experience.
4 more food journalists.
Aaron Guerrero
Aaron Guerrero is head of the digital department at Miami’s Community Newspapers, where he pairs restaurant coverage with community-facing content. He focuses on how Miami-area restaurants evolve, celebrate, and experiment through new concepts, menus, and neighborhood-focused dining experiences. He reports on restaurant openings, such as an Italian food hall at Plaza Coral Gables, new executive lunch menus, and wood-fired Latin steakhouse brunches, explaining what sets each venue apart. He also covers awards, like a Wine Spectator honor for an Italian chophouse, and events that turn dining rooms into social hubs. His bylines extend to features on sports-themed gatherings, civic renamings, local visits to restaurant programs, sponsored community pieces, and official notices. His work is straightforward and descriptive, helping readers and local businesses connect around specific openings, promotions, and dining experiences.
Aarron Fleming
Aarron Fleming reports on how courts, jails and public safety systems work over time. He is a reporter at The Daily Memphian covering public safety, the local court system, suburban news and business developments in North Mississippi. His work follows trials, sentencing, appeals, plea deals and judicial decisions, including major cases tied to Tyre Nichols and rapper Young Dolph. He also covers jail conditions, inmate deaths, crime data, prosecution units, trafficking, shootings and public-order incidents. His suburban reporting examines cannabis businesses, restaurant openings and how commercial growth affects communities such as Olive Branch. Fleming previously covered education in the same newsroom. He uses clear, unadorned prose to explain legal steps, deadlines, institutional problems and the political, commercial and community effects of public-safety decisions.
Alana Al-Hatlani
Alana Al-Hatlani is a food writer and editor who treats recipes, restaurants, and food features as ways to explore culture, community, and the business of eating. She works on the food team at Southern Living, overseeing and contributing to print recipes and reported features. Her pastry-focused, restaurant-tested perspective comes from time in restaurant and bakery kitchens. She helps plan and write monthly food packages, including “The South’s Most Treasured Desserts,” and wrote “8 Summer Recipes Our Editors Make Every Year.” She also writes recipe tips, ingredient explainers, restaurant guides, and reported stories about workers, owners, and communities. Her subjects include regional specialties, dining scenes, kitchen basics, and food industries. Her work has appeared with OpenTable and Yahoo. She reports on the ground, explains techniques clearly, and connects specific dishes and places to larger stories about food and livelihood.
Alana Edgin
Alana Edgin is a business reporter whose strongest focus is food, restaurants and consumer-facing businesses. She works at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and has also had work syndicated across AOL and Yahoo News. She covers new openings, closings, expansions and franchise growth, along with retail, health, services, corporate news, data incidents, business support programs and sponsorships. Her reporting includes detailed roundups of new restaurants and businesses, coverage of El Pollo Loco’s opening, and stories on burger trucks, dessert shops, Vietnamese sandwich restaurants and gourmet markets. She also contributes to food and drink reviews, including fall coffee and jerky comparisons. Edgin reports with practical “what, when, where” details, structured comparisons and clear explanations of how offers, partnerships and business changes affect consumers and the local economy.