Macy was for many years a reporter for The Roanoke Times and won more than a dozen national reporting/writing awards. She received a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard and the 2013 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress award for Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local—and Helped Save an American Town, a New York Times bestseller published by Little, Brown and Company in 2014. Her second book is titled Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South.