About the Contributors

Elizabeth Gritter is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her master's thesis explored civil rights and politics in Memphis, Tennessee. A graduate of American University in Washington, D.C., she works as a research assistant for the Southern Oral History Program.

Michael Kreyling teaches southern literature at Vanderbilt University. He has written three books on Eudora Welty, including Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell, and three books on southern literature, including Inventing Southern Literature. His most recent book is The Novels of Ross MacDonald, published in 2005.

Ruth Moose has published several collections of short stories and poetry, including Making the Bed: Poems and Dreaming in Color, as well as numerous stories and poems in publications such as Atlantic Monthly and The Nation. A member of the creative writing faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Moose is the recipient of five PEN Awards for Syndicated Fiction, a Robert Ruark Award for Short Story, a North Carolina Writers Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, and the Oscar Arnold Young Award for Poetry.

Steve Oney was educated at the University of Georgia and at Harvard, where he was a Nieman Fellow. His book on the Leo Frank case, And the Dead Shall Rise, was named by The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly as one of the best nonfiction books of 2003. It was also the winner of the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award for best book on America's legal system, the Jewish Book Council's National Jewish Book Award for best work of Jewish history, the Southern Book Critics Circle prize for best nonfiction book about the South, and the Georgia Historical Society's Malcolm and Muriel Bell Award for best work of Georgia history.

Timothy B. Tyson is Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture at Duke Divinity School, returning to his North Carolina roots after a decade teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author of Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power and, in 2004, of Blood Done Sign My Name, the story of a racial murder and black uprising which took place in his hometown of Oxford, North Carolina, when he was eleven years old.

Drew Whitelegg holds a doctorate in geography from King's College, London, and has published numerous articles on the airline industry—in particular flight attendants—and the South. He currently is a post doctoral research fellow at the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life and is completing Working the Skies, a book on flight attendants.