Robert Towery

What a long, strange journey.

By age twelve, Towery was operating a hot-metal press for his family’s newspaper in a small town tucked between Memphis and the Mississippi state line. Once a week, he descended into the purgatory of the paper’s deadline. He swore that he would never submit to the drudgeries of journalism.

Harboring a vague conceit that he was a writer, he graduated in English from Rhodes College in 1969, adopting two weakly linked notions for his future that embraced his primary passions, “Hm . . . I’ll become a racecar driver—that’s something you can write about.” The turbulence of the times abetted by his low draft number insisted otherwise. He headed off to the culture wars, wandering around Europe and England for a year before founding a commune in northwest Arkansas.

At 26, back home in Memphis, he took the helm of his family’s newspaper and printing company. He expanded its scope by launching Memphis magazine. Over the following decade, it won more journalism and illustration awards than any other city magazine in the United States. It lost money faster than a dog can swallow bacon.

In 1985, he established Towery Publishing. By the mid-90s, it had become the country’s largest publisher of city guides and also released more than 150 coffee table books about North American cities. In 1999, Inc. Magazine named the company among America’s 25 best mid-sized tech companies.

Today, Towery is creating books for his Urban Renaissance series about cities determined to get sustainability right.

He holds a fourth-degree black belt in Taekwondo, is an open-ocean sailor, and achieved his early goal of becoming a racecar driver. He has sailed in two hurricanes and was one of three drivers who (together) won the 1998 North American GrandSport Team Championship for Mazda.

He retired in 2020 from his role as Chief Instructor for ChinTrackDays, the country’s leading high-performance driver training organization.

He lives in Memphis with his good wife and bad dog. He has two children and two grandchildren.

Magnolia Song is his first novel. A sequel is in the works.