Jenny Adams Travels Worldwide Since Her Start in Oxford

Jenny Adams

A professional freelance travel writer and photographer, Jenny Adams, has strong ties to Oxford, Mississippi.

She’s a third-generation writer descending from her mother Cathy Adams, a journalism major graduate of University of Mississippi, and from her grandmother the late Sarah Criss of Greenwood who was a reporter and photographer for the Commercial Appeal.

Her mother, Cathy Adams said, “As her mother, I am exceedingly proud of her third generation career as a journalist. I am also grateful to Ed Meek and Oxford publishing for giving her a start just out of college, when she was fairly unfocused in direction. Ed recognized and encouraged her potential as a writer.”

She worked full-time at the Nightclub & Bar from 2004 to 2007, working her way up from a staff writer to associate editor. During this time, she also attended one semester of graduate school.

In 2007, Designer Phillip Collier of New Orleans approached her about writing writing a book down in New Orleans. She moved down to the city and Mixing New Orleans, Cocktails & Legends, a coffee table book on legendary bar stories as told by the owners of the establishments, was published in 2007.

“We have sold out of the original printing of 7,000 copies,” Adams says. “We are currently in discussions to reprint.”

That book was the beginning of her envious career.

She moved back to her hometown in Birmingham, Alabama in 2008 to freelance for local and regional publications, in addition to working at her mother’s magazine, Portico. In 2009, she moved again, this time to New York City to pursue larger magazine titles. She attended the annual writer’s conference, Travel Classics, and enrolled in the continuing education photography course at The School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Photo by Jenny Adams

The after-effects of the book’s success reached her in 2011. That year, Hotel Monteleone, a place featured heavily in Mixing New Orleans, contacted her to write the hotel’s commemorative history for its 125th anniversary.

“The Hotel Monteleone: More than a Landmark, the Heart of New Orleans since 1886” was published in 2011. During this time, the Gemini Spirits Company also contracted her as a writer to focus solely on the launch of their new tequila brand, Expresiones de Corazon. She spent two years working with them through its launch and initial marketing events.

Her career in New York is still focused on hospitality.

“I’ve always been interested in both beverage and travel,” Adams says. “Those are my primary areas of focus, and I currently write for an average of 30 publications a year.”

Her bylines include Imbibe, National Geographic Traveler, Travel & Leisure, Yahoo Travel, Hemispheres, American Way, Celebrating Living, and Robb Report. She was also the bar columnist for the Miami Herald’s travel section from 2008 to 2015, reporting on great places to drink around the globe, as well as a columnist for a year in 2013 for Garden & Gun’s ‘Southern in the City’ column.”

Pasay City, Manila, Philippines – children playing in the streets. Photo by Jenny Adams

Adams also had another interest: Southeast Asia.

“It’s a region that has captured my heart since my Buddhist Studies minor at the College of Charleston,” she said. Thus far she has traveled to the region more than a dozen times.

“If you ask Jenny Adams’ seven-year-old twin nieces where she lives, they answer ‘in airports,'” said her mother laughingly. “As an international food beverage and travel freelance magazine writer, Jenny lives a globe-trotting life that most 35-year-olds would envy. Jenny has ridden a runaway elephant in Thailand and been tear-gassed in Istanbul, and her focus has largely been in Asia. She has never lost her great Southern sense of having a heart and has enhanced her professional life with a true giving spirit, raising funds and personally distributing relief supplies in an impoverished Lower East Side New York neighborhood after Hurricane Sandy to putting herself at considerable personal risk living and working with a mission to street children in Cambodia.”

In 2012, Adams had to make “a more concentrated effort” to split her time between America and Asia. For the last four years, she lived in Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines from January until April. In the other months of the years she works in Manhattan’s East village.

“It is truly a blessing in life to be not only given a unique talent but to find an outlet to express a God given gift,” her mother says. “Her father and I are both in awe of her capability of expression and, as parents, deeply in admiration of Jenny as a human being.”

Jenny Adams certainly is a success story that began in Oxford.

You can follow her travels on her humor/travel blog, www.BuddhaDrinksFanta.com.

Callie Daniels Bryant is the senior managing editor at HottyToddy.com. She can be reached at callie.daniels@hottytoddy.com.