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

Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, was a novelist, short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist. Every Tongue Got to Confess, a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s and discovered in the Smithsonian archives, was published posthumously in 2001. Alice Walker’s famous revival of Hurston’s work in the 1970s is the model for the Lost Southern Voices Festival.

RALPH EMERSON McGILL (1898-1969)

Ralph McGill was an American journalist and an anti-segregationist editor at the Atlanta Constitution newspaper. He received a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1959. His book The South and the Southerner (1963) was re-published by University of Georgia Press in 1992. McGill received honorary doctorates from dozens of universities and colleges, including Harvard, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. In his honor, The McGill Lecture is held annually at The Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia, featuring a nationally recognized journalist. His personal papers are available at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts and Rare Book Library (MARBL) at Emory University Library. McGill’s role in the campaign against segregation is depicted Michael Braz’s opera, A Scholar Under Siege, composed for the centenary of Georgia Southern University and premiered in 2007. The Best of Ralph McGill: Selected Columns, edited by Michael Strickland, was published in 1997.

A plantation owner who vowed to “write what is, even if it is unpleasant,” Julia Peterkin revolutionized American literature in the 1920s by writing seriously about the lives of black farmers. In five bold, lyrical books she pushed the bounds of realism to earn the startled praise of such intellectuals and literary artists as W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. In 1929 Peterkin became the first Southern writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for her best-selling novel Scarlet Sister Mary.

Green Thursday, Black April, Scarlet Sister Mary, and Bright Skin chronicle the collapse of plantation agriculture in South Carolina, using the Gullah language in a literary way and portraying the points of view of black workers rather than their white owners. At the same time, Peterkin’s stories are often the thinly veiled autobiography of a southern white woman struggling to create something new out of the beauty and sorrow around her. Roll, Jordan, Roll, with text by Peterkin and photographs by her friend Doris Ulmann, is now one of the most hotly-collected documentary volumes of the twentieth century.

Peterkin paved the way both for the Southern Renaissance and for later African American writers.