About the Contributors

Charlie Curtis has worked in fashion photography and estate gardening. He lives in Free Union, Virginia, with his wife, Jackie, and his daughter, Emily. In addition to publishing his photographs in magazines, he currently is working to bring his pictures together in book form.

Bryan Giemza is a native of Raleigh, North Carolina, and a graduate of both the Appalachian Trail (where he says he was educated) and the University of North Carolina Law School (where he says he was educated beyond his intelligence). Presently he is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at unc and is assisting in the compilation of the upcoming Companion to Southern Literature. He counts himself a writer first; swamper, rounder, and gadabout philosopher are mere avocations.

Pamela Grundy is an independent historian living in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she works on a variety of writing, teaching and museum projects. She has just published a wide-ranging analysis of North Carolina sports entitled Learning to Win: Sports, Education and Social Change in Twentieth Century North Carolina. She is currently at work on an oral history-based book about West Charlotte High School, a historically black school that served as a national symbol of successful desegregation from the 1970s through the 1990s.

George Hovis is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of North Carolina, whose dissertation focuses on the yeoman ideal in contemporary North Carolina fiction. His publications include articles on Fred Chappell, Tennessee Williams, and Clyde Edgerton.

Andrew Hudgins is the author of five books of poetry and a book of essays. He has received many prizes, including the Hanes Poetry Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1995, and his collection, The Never-Ending, was finalist for the 1991 National Book Award in Poetry.

Eliza Russi Lowen McGraw received her Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University in 1999. She has published scholarly articles on topics such as the Southern Baptist Convention's conversion attempts and Jewishness in Robert Penn Warren's Flood. She currently lives in Cabin John, Maryland, where she is working on a book about southern Jewishness.

Daniel S. Pierce is visiting assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He is the author of The Great Smokies: From Natural Habitat to National Park.

John Shelton Reed, who recently retired from university life, was the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and the director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among his recent books is 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South, written with his wife, Dale Volberg Reed. He is coeditor of Southern Cultures.

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 most recent publication is Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. He is also coeditor of Southern Cultures.

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