Nicole Seitz is the author of seven novels, including, most recently, The Cage-Maker and Beyond Molasses Creek. She lives in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Jonathan Haupt is the executive director of the Pat Conroy Literary Center and the founding director of the annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival in Beaufort, South Carolina. Nathalie Dupree is a recipient of the Cordon Bleu Advanced Certificate. She has hosted more than three hundred top-rated television cooking shows on PBS, the Learning Channel, Star TV, and the Food Network. She founded Rich's Cooking School in 1972 and has taught more than ten thousand students around the world. She is the author of eleven cookbooks, including New Southern Cooking and Nathalie Dupree's Southern Memories (both Georgia) and her most recent, Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband, Jack Bass.

Nikky Finney is a professor of creative writing at the University of Kentucky and the author of three collections of poetry: On Wings Made of Gauze Rice, which won a PEN America Open Book Award; and The World Is Round. She is also the author of Heartwood, a collection of short stories. Mary Hood is also the author of Familiar Heat and How Far She Went (Georgia), a winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her work has been published in the Georgia Review, North American Review, and Yankee, among other publications. Terry Kay, the author of eleven books, was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2006. Nine of his books are novels, including To Dance with the White Dog and The Valley of Light, which received both the Best Fiction Award from the Georgia Writers Association and the Townsend Prize. Kay lives in Athens, Georgia. John Lane is a professor of English and environmental studies at Wofford College.

His books include Circling Home, My Paddle to the Sea, and Coyote Settles the South (all Georgia). He also coedited, with Gerald Thurmond, The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South (also Georgia). He has published several volumes of poetry, essays, and a novel, as well as a selection of his online columns, The Best of the Kudzu Telegraph. Anthropocene Blues: Poems is his most recent work. Steve Oney is the author of And the Dead Shall Rise, winner of the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award, the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award. Oney was educated at the University of Georgia and at Harvard, where he was a Nieman Fellow. He lives in Los Angeles.