Rod Andrew, Jr. is Professor of History at Clemson University.  His books include Long Gray Lines: The Southern Military School Tradition, 1839-1915 (2001); Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior to Southern Redeemer (2008); and General Andrew Pickens: Revolutionary War Hero, American Founder (2017), all by the University of North Carolina Press.  He is a retired colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve.

Margaret Donovan Bauer is the author of The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist (University Press of Florida, 1999), William Faulkner’s Legacy: “what shadow, what stain, what mark” (University Press of Florida, 2005), Understanding Tim Gautreaux (University of South Carolina Press, 2010), and A Study of Scarletts: Scarlett O’Hara and Her Literary Daughters (University of South Carolina Press, 2014). She is the Rives Chair of Southern Literature and a Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University and has served as Editor of the North Carolina Literary Review since 1997. In 2017, she received the North Carolina Award for Literature from Governor Roy Cooper, and in 2018 the John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities from the North Carolina Humanities Council.

Brian Brox is an Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of the U.S. Public Policy Program at Tulane University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in American politics with a focus on political parties, campaigns & elections, and public opinion.  He is the author of Back in the Game: Political Party Campaigning in an Era of Reform as well as articles and chapters on early voting, third parties, turnout, and voting behavior.

Casey Clabough is the author of the travel memoir The Warrior’s Path:  Reflections Along an Ancient Route, the memoir SCHOOLED:  Life Lessons of a College Professor, the novel Confederado, a collection of women’s Civil War writing, a biography of southern writer George Garrett, six scholarly books on southern and Appalachian writers, nad the latest Idiot’s Guide to Creative Writing.  Clabough serves as editor of the literature section of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities’ Encyclopedia Virginia, general editor of teh literary journal James Dickey Review, and series editor fo the multi-volume “Best Creative Nonfiction of the South.”  His work has appeared in over a hundred anthologies and magazines, including Creative Nonfiction, the Sewanee Review, and the Virginia Quarterly Review.  Clabough’s awards include the Bangladesh International Literary Award, an Artists Grant from the Brazilian Government, and several U.S.-based fellowships.  He lives on a farm in Appomattox, Virginia and runs the English graduate program at Lynchburg College.

Pearson Cross is Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UL Lafayette where he serves as Department Head. His principal areas of teaching and research are state and local politics and Louisiana politics. He has published articles and book chapters on topics including redistricting, elections, white supremacy, southern political culture, and the judiciary. He is nearing completion of a book about education reform in Louisiana. Another book, The Party is Over: The New Louisiana Politics, (with Dr. Christie Maloyed) is forthcoming on LSU press. Dr. Cross has a weekly radio show called Bayou to Beltway on KRVS (88.7 FM) that focuses on politics and policy and is a frequent commentator on political issues for news media at the national, state and local levels. Dr. Cross received his B.A. from San Francisco State University in 1985 and his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in Massachusetts in 1997.

Katherine Henninger is Russell B. Long Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University, where she specializes in 20th and 21st century U.S. southern literature, visual culture, childhood studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Ordering the Façade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing (U North Carolina P, 2007) and is currently at work on two monographs: The Mandingo Effect: U.S. Slavery and Sexuality on Screen, 1968-2018, and Made Strangely Beautiful: Southern Childhood in U.S. Literature and Film. The latter has been supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her essays on childhood studies, southern literature, postcolonial theory, photography in literature, and film studies have appeared in journals including American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, and The Southern Quarterly. She is also the co-founder of LSU’s Program in Louisiana and Caribbean Studies and serves on the Executive Council of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.

William T. Hoston, Sr. is Professor of Political Science, Director of the Mellon Center for Faculty Excellence, and also serves as an Associate Dean in the Marvin D. and June Samuel Brailsford College of Arts and Sciences at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU). He earned his PhD in Political Science at the University of New Orleans.  Dr. Hoston is the author or editor of six academic books.  His academic publications include: Toxic Silence: Race, Black Gender Identity, and Addressing the Violence against Black Transgender Women in Houston (2018), Race and the Black Male Subculture: The Lives of Toby Waller (2016), and Black Masculinity in the Obama Era: Outliers of Society (2014).  His last monograph book, Toxic Silence, won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award in the LGBTQ Studies category.

Joshua D. Rothman is Professor of History at the University of Alabama. He is the author of three books on the history of American slavery: Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (University of Georgia Press, 2012), which won the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award from the Southern Historical Association and the Michael V.R. Thomason Book Award from the Gulf South Historical Association; and The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America (Basic Books, 2021). He has published articles in the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of American History, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, and he has held numerous fellowships, including those from the Historic New Orleans Collection, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He has been a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians since 2008, and is also co-director of the online project, “Freedom on the Move: A Database of Fugitives from North American Slavery.”

Jay Watson is Distinguished Professor of English and Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies at the University of Mississippi, where he also directs the annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha conference.  He is author or editor of thirteen books, most recently a monograph, William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity (2019), and a coedited collection, Faulkner and Slavery (2021).

Jeannie Whayne is university professor of history at the University of Arkansas and author of two award-winning books: Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South (2011) and A New Plantation South: Land, labor, and Federal Favor (1996). She is the editor or a coauthor of nine other books, including The Ongoing Burden of Southern History: Politics and Identity in the Twenty-First-Century South (2012) and Arkansas: A Concise History (2019). Whayne is a distinguished lecturer with the Organization of American Historians, a fellow of the Agricultural History Society, and winner of the Arkansas Historical Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Whayne, who served as president of the Agricultural History Society (2013-2014), was awarded the Society’s Gladys Baker Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017. She is winner of the University of Arkansas’s Charles and Nadine Baum Distinguished Teaching Award (2020) and the Outstanding Mentor Award from the University of Arkansas Graduate School (2020).