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

Erskine Caldwell was an American novelist and short story writer. His books Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre received wide-acclaim and address poverty, racism, and social issues in the American South. In addition, Caldwell wrote 25 novels, 150 short stories, numerous other works, and edited the American Folkways series, a 28-volume series of books about different regions of the United States. With his wife photographer Margaret Bourke-White, Caldwell collaborated on three photo-documentaries including You Have Seen Their Faces (1937).

Horace Kephart was an American travel writer and librarian. He is best known as the author of Our Southern Highlands and the outdoors guide, Camping and Woodcraft. In 2005, the Hunter Library Special Collections at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina exhibited Horace Kephart:  Revealing an Enigma, which can be viewed at https://www.wcu.edu/library/ digitalcollections/kephart

Byron Herbert Reece authored four volumes of poetry and two collections of fiction. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952. A collection of his selected poems, Fable in the Blood, was published by University of Georgia Press in 2002. Reece was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2001. The Byron Herbert Reece Society, formed in 2002, has worked to create the Reece Farm and Heritage Center and with the Georgia Assembly to name Reece “Georgia’s Appalachian Poet/Novelist” and to designate Highway 129 from Blairsville to Neels Gap “The Byron Herbert Reece Memorial Highway.” The Byron Herbert Reece Society is an illustration of “reviving” a lost writer and bringing new readers to an author’s work.

John Ridge, born Skah-tle-loh-skee (Yellow Bird) in 1802, in the village of Oothacaloga, near present-day Calhoun, Georgia, was from a prominent Cherokee Nation family. He was top of his class at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut.  Early in his career, he worked for the Creek Nation, helping them to present their anti-Removal case to politicians and the press. Later, he was among the signatories of the spurious Treaty of New Echota of 1835, by which Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi were ceded in exchange for lands in Indian Territory. Ridge’s numerous political tracts that appeared in Georgia newspapers during the Removal era have not been collected nor re-printed.

CELESTINE SIBLEY (1914-1999)

Celestine Sibley was a celebrated columnist at the Atlanta Constitution from 1941 to 1999. Kim Purcell writes in the New Georgia Encyclopedia, that “Over her long career, [Sibley] wrote more than 10,000 columns and many news stories of astonishing range, dealing with such varied topics as politics and key lime pie. Sibley was one of the most popular and long-running columnists for the Constitution, and her well-written and poignant essays on southern culture made her an icon in the South. Regarded by her colleagues as a reporting legend, Sibley was also the accomplished author of nearly thirty books published between 1958 and 1997.” She wrote fiction, nonfiction, and mystery novels. She won the first Townsend Prize for Fiction in 1982 for her novel Children, My Children and in 1988 published a memoir Turned Funny. She was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2007 and into Georgia Women of Achievement in 2010.