HUGH RUPPERSBURG is Emeritus University Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the literature section editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

COLEMAN BARKS is the best-selling translator of The Essential Rumi The Soul of Rumi, and Rumi: The Book of Love and author of numerous volumes of poetry including Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008 (Georgia). He taught creative writing and American poetry in the English Department at the University of Georgia for thirty years and currently lives in Athens, Georgia.

ROY BLOUNT JR.'s works include the memoir Be Sweet: A Conditional Love Story, the novel First Hubby, the screenplay for Larger than Life, the edited anthology Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor, and such collections as Now, Where Were We? and Not Exactly What I Had in Mind. He is a frequent guest on Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" and a columnist for the Oxford American. He lives in New York City and western Massachusetts.

JUDITH ORTIZ COFER (1952–2016) was the Regents’ and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing Emerita at the University of Georgia. She is also the author of The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women, An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio, Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer; and many other books. The University of Georgia Press published her first novel, The Line of the Sun, in 1989.

STEPHEN COREY is editor of the Georgia Review and the author of nine collections of poems, most recently There Is No Finished World.

JUDSON MITCHAM's poems have appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, and Harper’s. His novels, The Sweet Everlasting and Sabbath Creek, are both winners of the Townsend Prize for Fiction. He teaches writing at Mercer University.

MARION MONTGOMERY was a poet, novelist, and critic who taught English at the University of Georgia for more than thirty years. His most recent books include With Walker Percy at the Tupperware Party: In Company with Flannery O'Connor, T. S. Eliot, and Others, and Hillbilly Thomist: Flannery O'Connor, St. Thomas and the Limits of Art, as well as On Matters Southern: Essays About Literature and Culture, 1964-2000.

BYRON HERBERT REECE was a lifelong resident of the north Georgia mountains. An author whose work is closely tied to the spirit and traditions of Appalachia, he wrote two novels: The Hawk and the Sun and Better a Dinner of Herbs (Georgia). In addition, Reece was the author of four highly acclaimed volumes of poetry.

PHILIP LEE WILLIAMS is the author of eleven books, including The True and Authentic History of Jenny Dorset and Crossing Wildcat Ridge. His novel A Distant Flame is winner of the Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction. Williams lives with his family near Athens, Georgia.

HUGH RUPPERSBURG is Emeritus University Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the literature section editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia.