William Akers has written screenplays for 15 years. His scripts include Ernest Rides Again and The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase, and he adapted Simon Murray's diary of five years in the French Foreign Legion as Simon: An English Legionnaire. In television, he has written for Lois & Clark and Strange Luck, and was a staff writer on the original Eerie, Indiana. Akers has written and directed non-broadcast documentaries, written and produced a live story-driven motor racing series for cable and written and directed children's videos. He is currently preparing to produce Signs Following, an Appalachian gothic film about snake handlers and dope growers he co-wrote with Dub Cornett. It has been optioned by Pink Slip Pictures in Los Angeles. Akers teaches filmmaking and screenwriting at Vanderbilt University.
Ben Fountain’s fiction has appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review and Zoetrope: All Story. His collection of short stories is Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which received an O. Henry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes and the PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2007 he was awarded the Whiting Writers Award. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Fountain lives with his wife and their two children in Dallas, Texas.
Katori Hall is a playwright-performer from Memphis, Tennessee. Her award-winning plays include Hoodoo Love, Remembrance, Hurt Village, The Mountaintop and Freedom Train. She has received numerous awards including the 2007 Fellowship of Southern Writers Bryan Family Foundation Award in Drama, the 2006 New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Playwriting and Screenwriting and the 2006 Royal Court Theatre Residency. As a journalist, her work has been published in The Boston Globe, Essence, Newsweek and The Commercial Appeal. She has recently been commissioned to write a modern day Antigone set in post-Katrina New Orleans. Hall graduated from Columbia University majoring in African-American Studies and Creative Writing. She is a member of the Women’s Project Playwrights’ Lab, the Dramatists Guild and the Lark Playwrights’ Workshop.
Nancy Henderson is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in Smithsonian, The New York Times, Parade, U.S. Airways magazine and many other publications. She is the author of Able! How One Company’s Disabled Workforce Became the Key to Extraordinary Success, which is being reprinted with a new foreword by top executives from Walgreens. A member of The Authors Guild and the prestigious American Society of Journalists and Authors, Henderson often writes about Southern culture, disability issues and people who are making a difference in the world. 
Randall Kenan is the author of five books, including A Visitation of Spirits and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, a nominee for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and a New York Times Notable Book for 1992. His nonfiction work includes Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century and The Fire This Time. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award and the Sherwood Anderson Award. He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Sean Price has written more than 35 books for children and teenagers, most of them on topics tied to history, science, or public health. He has also written or edited nine books for teachers and contributed to numerous textbooks and reference books. A former managing editor of Junior Scholastic magazine in New York, Price has written for many nation-wide publications including New York Times Upfront, Teen People, National Geographic Kids and Weekly Reader. He lives in Chattanooga.READ SEAN PRICE'S KEYNOTE ADDRESS TO YOUNG WRITERS ON OUR BLOG.
John Sedgwick is the author of the novels The Dark House, In My Blood, and The Education of Mrs. Bemis and has written extensively for Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Newsweek and many other magazines. He is best known for his memoir writings about many of the famous people in his family and how his lineage has shaped who he is today. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 
Allen Wier has published the novels A Place for Outlaws, Departing as Air, Blanco and Tehano, as well as collection of stories, Things About to Disappear. In 1997 he received the Robert Penn Warren Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and he was voted into the Fellowship in 2001. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the University of Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters. Wier has recently completed the draft of a novel, Skin for Skin, and he is completing a new volume of short stories. He is the Hodges Chair for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
Lolly Winston is the author of the novel, Good Grief, a New York Times best seller that was translated into 15 languages. The film rights have been optioned by Universal Studios. Her second novel, Happiness Sold Separately, was also a New York Times best seller. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Northern California.
Nancy Hatch Woodward has published over 500 articles in more than 40 publications, covering human resources, employee communications, diversity, employment law, and health care. Her articles have appeared in HR Magazines, Ladies’ Home Journal, GEICO Direct, and Massage Magazine. She is also the co-author of the book Eldercare: Caring for Your Aging Parents (National Institute of Business Management 2002). In addition, Woodward directed Employee Communications for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee and has written on a freelance basis for a number of national companies, including Health Advocate, Inc., International SOS, and UNUM.