Tema Stauffer is a photographer whose work examines the social, economic, and cultural landscape of American spaces. She is currently an Associate Professor of Photography at East Tennessee State University. Her work has been exhibited at Sasha Wolf, Daniel Cooney Fine Art, and Jen Bekman galleries in New York, as well as galleries and institutions internationally. In 2018, Daylight Books published a monograph of her Upstate series portraying the lingering legacy of American industrial and agricultural history in and around Hudson, New York. The book was nominated for the Unveil'd Photobook Award 2018 and the prints were exhibited at ETSU's Reece Museum, Tracey Morgan Gallery, ilon Art Gallery, and Hudson Hall. Her work is represented by Tracey Morgan Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina, where her current series, Southern Fiction, will be exhibited in Fall 2021. The production of this body of work received support from ETSU's Research Development Committee through a Small Grant Award in 2019 and a Major Grant Award in 2020. She is the recipient of a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship award towards completing this project.

Casey Cep is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. She is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She lives with her family on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Lauren Rhoades is a writer and the director of the Eudora Welty House & Garden, a literary house museum in Jackson, Mississippi operated by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Her fiction, essays, and book reviews have been published in the Southwest Review, StorySouth, the Mississippi Books Page, Eudora Welty Review, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of a Tent Creative Writing Fellowship at the Yiddish Book Center, a finalist for the Indiana Review Creative Nonfiction Prize, and a finalist for the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. Currently, Lauren is at work on a memoir-in-essays about divorce, daughterhood, and identity. She received an MFA in creative writing from the Mississippi University for Women.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a novelist, poet, and essayist. Her first novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, was an Oprah's Book Club pick; Love Songs was long-listed for the National Book Award in Fiction, included in "10 Best Books of 2021" lists for The New York Times and The Washington Post, selected as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the Prize for First Novel of the Center for Fiction and nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work: Debut. Her fifth poetry collection The Age of Phillis was long-listed for the National Book Award in Poetry and won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work: Poetry. A native southerner, Jeffers now lives and teaches on the prairie: she holds the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English at the University of Oklahoma.