Award-winning journalist, author and businessman Mark A. Stevens is president of MAS Communications LLC, a publishing and marketing firm, and director of tourism development for the Georgetown County (South Carolina) Chamber of Commerce. As director of tourism development, he's responsible for promotion of SC's Hammock Coast region, which includes Garden City, Murrells Inlet, Litchfield Beach, Pawleys Island, Georgetown and Andrews. As president of MAS Communications, he has published new books by celebrated Kentucky poet Clem Stambaugh and Southern novelist Robert Lamb. He is a former newspaper executive, having served as publisher and editor at newspapers in Tennessee, Louisiana and South Carolina and worked for some of the nation's biggest media companies, including Carl A. Jones Newspaper Group, Sandusky Newspapers, Gannett, Elizabethton Newspapers Inc., Boone Newspapers, and Evening Post. He served as publisher of The Erwin Record and set a still-unbeaten state record in Tennessee for the most consecutive wins of the Tennessee Press Association's General Excellence Award. While an editor at Gannett-owned The Daily Advertiser, the newspaper also won the General Excellence award from the Louisiana Press Association and was named Newspaper of the Year. As publisher of the Elizabethton Star, Stevens continued his top-award-winning ways and won the state's General Excellence nod two years in a row (2013 and 2014). He repeated his success in South Carolina, where, in 2017, The Georgetown Times won the coveted the SCPA President's Award as the best newspaper in South Carolina in its division, and garnered 53 awards in the annual contest. Stevens has won numerous writing awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and press associations. Washington, D.C.-based Presstime Magazine named him one of the nation's best newspaper professionals. Stevens is author of four books, including "The Clinchfield No. 1: Tennessee's Legendary Steam Engine," an Amazon "Top Seller," and "The One & Only: A Pictorial History of the Clinchfield No. 1," now available in a limited-edition anniversary edition.