A former Kellogg Hunt Professor of English at Florida State University, Wendy Bishop is the author or editor of numerous books, essays, and articles on composition and creative writing pedagogy. Her twenty-two books include My Last Door from Anhinga Press. She was a frequent presenter and speaker at professional conferences. She served as chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and as a co-vice president and member of the board of directors for the Associated Writing Programs (AWP).

Larry Brown  was an American novelist, short story and nonfiction writer. He was born in and grew up near Oxford, Mississippi. He won numerous awards including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for fiction, the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award, and Mississippi’s Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He was also the first two-time winner of the Southern Book Award for Fiction. Ellen Douglas recognized and encouraged Brown early in his efforts to begin a writing career. Brown is the author of Dirty Work, Father and Son, Joe, and Big Bad Love. Joe was made into a film starring

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in New Jersey, Cofer was a Regents’ and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Her writing career began with poetry and she became well known for her creative nonfiction. In 2010, Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. Her work includes adult and young adult short stories and novels, poetry, essays, and other nonfiction. Among her many works are The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women, The Cruel Country, A Love Story Beginning in Spanish, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood.

Associated with the Fugitives and Southern Agrarians, poet Donald (Grady) Davidson was born in Tennessee and earned both a BA and an MA from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Davidson published five collections of poetry The Outland Piper (1924), The Tall Men (1927), Lee in the Mountains and Other Poems (1938), The Long Street: Poems (1961), and Collected Poems: 1922–1961 (1966). In the 1920s, Davidson co-founded and co-edited the influential journal The Fugitive. His prose writings include an essay in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930); a collection, Still Rebels, Still Yankees and Other Essays (1957); and Southern Writers in the Modern World (1958), which he first delivered as a lecture at Mercer University in Georgia. Davidson wrote a two-volume history of Tennessee, The Tennessee Volume One: The Old River: Frontier to Secession (1946) and The Tennessee Volume Two: The New River: Civil War to TVA (1948). His novel,The Big Ballad Jamboree, was published posthumously by the University Press of Mississippi (1996). Davidson taught English at Vanderbilt University from 1920 to 1968. He spent summers teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont.

Joyce Carol Oates described James Dickey’s perspective as a desire to “to take on ‘his’ own personal history as an analogue to or a microscopic exploration of 20th-century American history.” Dickey described his style as “country surrealism.” He flew more than 100 combat missions during World War II. “I came to poetry with no particular qualifications,” he recounted in Howard Nemerov’s Poets on Poetry. “I had begun to suspect, however, that there is a poet—or a kind of poet—buried in every human being like Ariel in his tree, and that the people whom we are pleased to call poets are only those who have felt the need and contrived the means to release this spirit from its prison.” Dickey is the author of Deliverance and more than two dozen volumes of poetry. The Complete Poems of James Dickey was published in 2013.

Josephine Claxton chose the pseudonym Ellen Douglas when her first novel, A Family’s Affairs was to be published in 1962.  Apostles of Light (1973) was a National Book Award finalist, but it is Can’t Quit You Baby that is the essential novel of her career. Douglas’s nonfiction includes Truth: Four Stories I Am Old Enough to Tell and Witnessing. Following Douglas’s death, Margalit Fox wrote in the New York Times that Douglas’s work “explored the epochal divide between the Old South and the New, examining vast, difficult subjects — race relations, tensions between the sexes, the conflict between the needs of the individual and those of the community — through the small, clear prism of domestic life.”