About the Contributors

Brooks Blevins teaches history and serves as director of regional studies at Lyon College in Batesville, Arkansas. He is the author of three books, including Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarkers and Their Image, published by University of North Carolina Press.

Hal Crowther is a syndicated columnist and award-winning author. Crowther's collections of essays include Cathedrals of Kudzu, which won the Lillian Smith Book Award for Commentary. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with wife Lee Smith.

William R. Ferris is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of History, Senior Associate Director of the Center for the Study of the American South, and adjunct professor of folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ferris has made numerous documentary films and has authored over 100 publications in the fields of folklore, history, literature, and photography.

Robert Flournoy is a photographer and artist. A graduate of Auburn University, he has worked in the oil and beverage industries as well as serving in the U.S. military for three years in Germany and Vietnam. He currently works for Bentley Prince Street Mills, and he and his wife Lorrie have two children: son Brent, seventeen, and daughter Madison, fourteen.

Louis Kyriakoudes is author of The Social Origins of the Urban South: Race, Gender and Migration in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, 1890-1930, published in 2003 by the University of North Carolina Press. He is associate professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he teaches social and economic history.

Robert Hill Long is author of three books and has published poetry and flash-fiction in numerous literary reviews. He was the founding director of the North Carolina Writers' Network, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Oregon Arts Commission. He teaches at the University of Oregon.

Ron Rash is director of Appalachian studies at Western Carolina University and author of several books of poetry and fiction. His novel Saints at the River will be published this year by Henry Holt.

John Shelton Reed is coeditor of Southern Cultures and William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He spent January 2004 as Humana Visiting Professor at Centre College, and currently is visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His latest book is Minding the South, published by the University of Missouri Press.

Lee Smith is the author of nine novels and two short-story collections, and recipient of eight major writing awards. A native of southwestern Virginia, she resides in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with husband Hal Crowther.

Harry L. Watson is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of UNC's Center for the Study of the American South. His publications include Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America, published by Hill & Wang. He also is coeditor of Southern Cultures.