About the Contributors

Katie Algeo is assistant professor of geography at Western Kentucky University. Her dissertation, "Tobacco Farming in the Age of the Surgeon General's Warning," examined the agricultural development of Madison County, North Carolina.

John Beecher authored several volumes of poetry, including Report to the Stockholders, To Live and Die in Dixie, and In Egypt Land. Born in New York City and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, he became a radical poet in the 1930s and was blacklisted during the McCarthy years. He struggled against segregation throughout the Civil Rights era.

J. Michael Butler is assistant professor of history at South Georgia College, and his essays have appeared in The Journal of Southern History, The Journal of Mississippi History, and Popular Music and Society. He currently is completing a study of the black freedom struggle in the Gulf South and is recording the memoirs of Civil Rights leader Reverend H. K. Matthews.

Phillip Goetzinger is a multi-medium artist, writer, and landscaper born and raised in Arlington, Virginia, and now residing in Portland, Oregon.

Angela Potter worked for many years in the environmental conservation movement before graduating from Exeter University with a degree in English and American studies. She currently is editing a collection of letters between her grandmother and mother. She lives on Dartmoor, in the southwest of England, with her husband and two teenaged children.

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

Hugh Ruppersburg is professor of English and associate dean of arts and sciences at the University of Georgia. He has written books on William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren, and has edited four collections of Georgia writing, the most recent of which is After O'Connor: Stories from Contemporary Georgia. He also coedited Critical Essays on Don DeLillo and currently serves as literature section editor for the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

Kieran Taylor is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and coeditor of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume IV: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957-December 1958, and the forthcoming volume, Labor and the Cold War at the Grassroots: Unions, Politics, and Postwar Political Culture. He currently is working on a study of radicals in the labor movement in the 1970s.

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.