Kelly Kazek
Kelly Kazek connects everyday consumer stories with a long-standing interest in Southern places and culture, using food, retail and local history as her main threads. She is an award-winning journalist and author for AL.com who writes about trends in business and retail news. Her current coverage leans toward food-related products, promotions and regional chains, while drawing on years of work about Southern history, ghost towns and oddities. She has written more than 28 books for children and adults and continues to blend reporting with storytelling across outlets and formats.
Retail promotions and fast-food copycats
Kazek’s recent work tracks how retailers and brands use food and consumer products to capture attention, often through copycats and playful marketing.
In a headline about a store selling a Chick-fil-A copycat sandwich, she zeroes in on the way a retailer mimics a beloved fast-food item and frames it as something readers will “want to try,” highlighting taste, convenience and brand imitation in simple, direct language. In her piece on a taco eatery offering “emotional support tacos” to help customers cope with World Cup stress, she uses the promotion itself as the story’s hook, showing how food businesses lean into humor and emotional branding rather than reviewing the menu in detail.
Across these food-adjacent stories, she treats restaurant and retail offerings as signals of broader business trends, focusing on what the promotion says about customer behavior and brand strategy rather than on culinary critique alone.
Her beat also extends to high-visibility events that sit at the intersection of leisure, media and spectacle. In a feature on the winner of Florida’s annual python hunt, she chronicles how one participant captured an unusually high number of invasive snakes, turning a niche competition into an accessible human-interest and environmental story for general readers. The same eye for unusual angles on familiar subjects - whether a taco promotion, a copycat sandwich or a wildlife hunt - shapes her food and retail coverage, which favors clear explanations and intriguing, shareable details over insider restaurant commentary.
Southern history, ghost towns and ruins
Before focusing on business and retail trends, Kazek built a substantial archive of features on Southern history, ghost towns and historic sites, and that background still informs the way she frames contemporary stories. She has written guides to ghost town road trips in Northeast Alabama, inviting readers to visit abandoned communities and documenting what remains through narrative and photographs. In a piece on Pleasant Gap, she explains how the former mill town became a ghost town, drawing on historical records such as post office dates to trace the community’s rise and decline. Her coverage of “Dying Downtowns” examines shuttered small-town business districts, pairing her own back-road photography with observations about economic change and loss.
Kazek often uses specific structures and sites as anchors for broader historical storytelling.
Features on unusual historic structures in each Alabama county highlight distinctive buildings and the local histories behind them. She has written about historic ruins preserved as sites, including an overview of notable ruins that recount the state’s past, again combining accessible descriptions with concise context. Pieces on Bryce Hospital, the historic insane asylum, and on beautiful, historically important cemeteries further show her interest in the way institutions and burial grounds reflect social and architectural history.
In a long-form feature remembering when the “Goat Man” visited Alabama, she reconstructs the travels of a roaming figure and the photographs that documented him, using archival images and interviews to revive a slice of regional folklore. This sustained attention to ghost towns, ruins, cemeteries and itinerant characters gives her current work a distinctive historical texture, even when the immediate subject is a modern retailer or promotion.
Books, humor and offbeat storytelling
Kazek’s reporting is shaped by her parallel career as a prolific author and humor writer.
Author pages describe her as an award-winning journalist and author who has written more than 28 books for children and adults, with many titles rooted in Southern themes and curiosities. Professional profiles and her personal site emphasize her work as a humor columnist and her ongoing focus on Southern oddities, road trips and “very big things,” underscoring an affinity for offbeat subjects and light, approachable storytelling.
She maintains an online presence where she shares updates on her books, speaking engagements and columns, positioning her reporting within a broader body of narrative work about the South.
This combination of journalism, books and humor gives her AL.com coverage a clear identity. Food stories and retail trend pieces are written in plain, conversational prose, often built around unusual promotions, nostalgic products or quirky competitions rather than technical business analysis. Historical features rely on straightforward exposition and vivid but economical detail, presenting complex histories - ghost towns, ruins, institutions - in a way that general readers can absorb quickly. Across beats, the constant is her focus on the interesting angle: a copycat sandwich, “emotional support” tacos, a python hunter’s record haul, a vanished downtown or a long-forgotten traveler with a herd of goats. That consistency of subject matter and tone distinguishes her from a generic food reporter and makes her especially aligned with stories that sit at the junction of food, retail marketing, Southern history and oddball Americana.
4 more food journalists.
Aaron Guerrero
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Aarron Fleming
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Alana Al-Hatlani
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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.