Wendell Berry is a poet and the author of fiction that includes
A Place on Earth,
Remembering,
Fidelity,
The Memory of Old Jack,
A World Lost and Jayber Crow. His essays are
The Unforeseen Wilderness,
What are People For?, Another Turn of the Crank,
Life is a Miracle and
The Unsettling of America, which became a manual for the conservation movement. He is a past Fellow of the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. Mr. Berry is a member of the
Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Robert Hicks, author of
The Widow Of the South, was born and raised in south Florida and moved to Tennessee in 1974. Working both as a music publisher and in artist management in both country and rock music, Hick's interests remain broad and varied. A partner in the B. B. King's blues clubs in Nashville, Memphis and Los Angeles, Hicks currently serves as curator of vibe of the corporation. Hicks is also involved in many different history preservation projects, including Franklin's Charge: A Vision and Campaign for the Preservation of Historic Open Space, which is fighting to preserve what is remaining of the Civil War battlefield in Williamson County, Tennessee.
Catherine Landis, a fiction writer, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but grew up in Chattanooga. She graduated from high school in 1974 and went to Davidson College in North Carolina, graduating receiving her BA in English in 1978. She worked in the media for several years, first at a newspaper and later at a television station. During these time periods Landis wrote short stories, one of which won the Leslie Garrett Award from the Writer’s Guild. In 1995, she started a novel,
Some Days There’s Pie, which was published in 2002. Her second novel,
Harvest, was released in late 2004.
William Henry Lewis was born in Denver and grew up in many cities, most significantly Chattanooga, Tennessee. In addition to teaching elementary, junior, and senior high school students, he has taught at the University of Virginia, Denison University, Mary Washington College, Trinity College, and most recently, the College of the Bahamas and Centre College, and is now Associate Professor of English at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY. His fiction has appeared in America's top literary journals and several anthologies, including
Best American Short Stories of 1996. His first book,
In the Arms of Our Elders, was published by Carolina Wren Press in 1995 and has since seen three printings. His second collection of stories,
I Got Somebody in Staunton, was honored as a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Prize for Fiction, and has been named as a Fiction Honor Book for 2005 by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and included in Kirkus Reviews listing for Best Books of 2005.
Jon Meacham is Editor of
Newsweek magazine and the author of several nonfiction works, including
Voices in Our Blood: America’s Best on the Civil Rights Movement and
Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, which was named a book of the year by the
Los Angeles Times and became a
New York Times bestseller. Meacham's newest book,
American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (2006), also became a
New York Times bestseller. Born in Chattanooga in 1969, Meacham graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, with a degree in English literature. He lives in New York City with his wife and children, where he is at work on a biography of Andrew Jackson and his White House circle.
Greg Williamson is the author of two books of poems,
The Silent Partner and
Errors in the Script. The Silent Partner was the recipient of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize in 1995, and Williamson won the Whiting Award in 1998. His work has appeared in publications such as
The Yale Review,
The Paris Review, and
The New Republic. He currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University.
