About the Contributors

Doris Betts, author of nine books of fiction, recently retired after thirty-five years teaching writing workshops at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She and her husband live on an Arabian horse farm near Pittsboro, North Carolina, where she is at work on two novels.

Cathy Smith Bowers is Poet-in-Residence at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her work has appeared in many publications including The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, Poetry, and The Southern Review. The poems featured in this issue appeared in her books The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas and Traveling in Time of Danger, both from Iris Press.

franklin forts is a doctoral student in history at the University of Georgia. A native of Atlanta, he is interested generally in the modern South and specifically in environmental history and the relationship between collective memory and historical scholarship.

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.

Louis D. Rubin Jr. retired in 1989 as University Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and in 1991 as editorial director and publisher of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. He is a native of Charleston, South Carolina, and a former chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His fifty-first and most recent book is An Honorable Estate: My Time in the Working Press (Louisiana State University Press, 2001).

Anthony Walton is the author of Mississippi: An American Journey (Alfred Knopf, 1996) and coeditor, with Michael S. Harper, of The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (Vintage, 2000). A native of Illinois, he teaches at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

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 (Hill & Wang, 1990). He also is coeditor of Southern Cultures.