About the Contributors

About the Contributors Elizabeth Boyd is a doctoral candidate in American studies at the University ofTexas at Austin. She is completing a study ofgender performance in southern beauty pageants, sorority rushes, and Confederate balls. A native Mississippian, she lives and works in Oxford. Gavin James Campbell is music editor for Southern Cultures. He received his Ph.D. in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel HiU. The topic ofhis dissertation was "Music and the Making ofaJim Crow Culture, 1900—1925." Pat Conroy is a southern writer whose career was launched in 1972 with The Water Is Wide, an autobiographical account of his experiences as a teacher at a black school in South Carolina. The son of a Marine Corps pilot and a graduate ofThe Citadel, his novels include The Great Santini, The Lords ofDiscipline, The Prince ofTides, and Beach Music. Kendra Hamilton is an award-winning writer whose poems have appeared in Callaloo and whose essays and articles have appeared in ArtUes, Black Issues in HigherEducation, Public News, and Callaloo. She has a Masters of Fine Arts from Louisiana State University and is a member of the Cave Canem poets' collective. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is writing a dissertation on the intersection of race, memory, architecture, and literature in novels set in twentieth-century Charleston. Noel Polk is professor ofEnglish at the University of Southern Mississippi and is a prolific Faulkner scholar. John Shelton Reed is William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and the director of the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among his recent books is jooi Things Everyone ShouldKnowAbout the South, written with his wife, Dale Volberg Reed. He is coeditor oí Southern Cultures. Elizabeth Robeson is a doctoral candidate in U.S. history at Columbia University. She found Zora Neale Hurston's letter to W. E. B. Du Bois while researching an essay about South Carolina novelist Julia Peterkin. Harry L. Watson is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent publication is Liberty and Power: The Politics ofjacksonian America. He also is coeditor of Southern Cultures. 109 ...