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Joseph R. Bankoff joined the Woodruff Arts Center in September 2006 as president and CEO. He has been an active part of the Atlanta arts community for many years. He worked to raise funds for Atlanta Arts Alliance (original name of the Woodruff Arts Center) and the 1983 expansion of the High Museum. He is a charter member of the High and long-time subscriber to the Alliance Theatre. He joined the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's Board of Directors in 1996 after arranging for the ASO to perform at the Olympics Games Opening and Closing ceremonies.

A physician, humorist, storyteller, and best-selling novelist, Ferrol Sams is the author of eight books. Most notable is his trilogy of novels in which an eccentric and quixotic hero, Porter Osborne Jr., mirrors Sams's own Georgia boyhood in Fayette County. All of his works are rooted in the oral traditions of southern humor and folklore. With engaging and graceful prose, Sams's fiction celebrates love of the land, the changing southern landscape, and what he calls "being raised right" in the rural South. One of four children born to Mildred Matthews and Ferrol Sams Sr., the Fayette County school superintendent, Ferrol Sams Jr. (nicknamed "Sambo" by his father) was born on September 26, 1922, in Fayetteville, in the house built by his great-grandfather in 1848. Ferrol Sams Jr. graduated from Mercer University in Macon in 1942 and attended Emory University School of Medicine for two quarters before joining the U.S. Army Medical Corps. After serving from 1943 to 1947 and seeing action in France, Sams returned to Emory to continue his medical studies. He received his M.D. in 1949. He began writing his first novel in September 1978, as notes for a family history, so he could tell his four children and ten grandchildren what it was like to grow up in rural Georgia between the two world wars. The novel, which became a national best-seller, is a boy's account of growing up on an ancestral farm in Georgia. With wit, humor, and old-fashioned moralizing, Sams's stories are about unlikely encounters and what people learn from them. A natural storyteller whose works have made him a popular writer in the South and garnered favorable national attention, Ferrol Sams was honored in 2001 for fifty years of commitment and service to the people of Fayette County. In 2006 *Run with the Horsemen* was selected by Atlantans as the inaugural text in the Atlanta Reads: One Book, One Community program. In 2007 Sams was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Eugenie Clark is a world-renowned ichthyologist and authority on sharks who is popularly known as the Shark Lady. Although she is now retired from teaching in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she joined the faculty in 1968, she still holds the title of Senior Research Scientist and Professor Emerita. She currently works on her research in the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory Mote Marine Labs , where her title is Senior Research Scientist and Founding Director. She was a research assistant at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the New York Zoological Society, and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. She was the founding director (1955 to 1967) of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, now a leading center for shark research called the Mote Marine Laboratory with which she is still affiliated. Dr. Clark is the recipient of three honorary D.Sc. degrees and awards from the National Geographic Society, the Explorers Club, the Underwater Society of America, the American Littoral Society, the Gold Medal Award of the Society of Women Geographers, and the President's Medal of the University of Maryland. She has authored three books and over 160 scientific and popular articles. Clark has conducted 71 deep submersible dives. Her latest research projects concern the behavior of tropical sand fishes and deep sea sharks. These studies have been featured in 12 articles she has written for National Geographic magazine.

Susan Mitchell Crawley is associate curator of folk art at the High Museum of Art. Her traveling retrospective exhibition of the sculpture of the Georgia wood carver Ulysses Davis is currently touring the United States. Her previous exhibitions include “Dreamscapes: Imaginary Landscapes from the Folk Art Collection” (2009), “Louis Monza: From Politics to Paradise” (2007), and “Southern Vernacular: Nineteenth Century Folk Art,” an ongoing installation of vernacular furniture, pottery, and textiles from the High’s permanent collection. Crawley received a master of arts degree in art history from Georgia State University in January 2005.

Charles Reagan Wilson is the Kelly Gene Cook Sr. Chair of History and Professor of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, where he has taught since 1981. He has worked extensively with graduate students and served as Director of the Southern Studies academic program from 1991 to 1998, and Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture from 1998-2007. Wilson received bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Texas at El Paso and earned his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin. He taught at the University of Wurzburg, Germany, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Texas Tech University before coming to Oxford. Wilson is the author of *Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920* (1980), a study of the memory of the Confederacy in the post-Civil War South, and *Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis* (1995), which studies popular religion as a part of the culture of the modern South. He is also coeditor (with Bill Ferris) of *the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture* (1989), which received the Dartmouth Prize from the American Library Association as best reference book of the year and is also coeditor of *The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture*, currently in production. He is editor or coeditor of *Religion and the American Civil War* (1998), *The New Regionalism *(1996), and *Religion in the South* (1985).

Jim Grimsley is a playwright and novelist who was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in 1955. Jim's first novel *Winter Birds* won the 1995 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Prix Charles Brisset, given by the French Academy of Physicians. The novel also received a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation as one of three finalists for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Jim's second novel, *Dream Boy*, was published by Algonquin in September, 1995, and won the 1996 Award for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Literature from the American Library Association; the novel was also one of five finalists for the Lambda Literary Award. Jim has written eleven full-length and four one-act plays, including *Mr. Universe*, *The Lizard of Tarsus*, *White People* and *The Existentialists*. He has been playwright-in-residence at 7Stages Theatre of Atlanta since 1986 and was playwright in residence at About Face Theatre of Chicago from 2000-2004. In 1988 he was awarded the George Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Playwright for his play *Mr. Universe*. He was also awarded the first-ever Bryan Prize for Drama, presented by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for distinguished achievement in playwriting.

Hampton Sides is an American historian and magazine journalist. He is the author of several bestselling works of narrative history and literary non-fiction. *Ghost Soldiers* won the 2002 PEN USA award for nonfiction. Sides is editor-at-large for *Outside* magazine and has written for such periodicals as *National Geographic*, *The New Yorker*, *Esquire*, *Preservation*, *Men's Journal*, *Men's Vogue*, and *The Washington Post*. His magazine work, collected in numerous published anthologies, has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing. Sides is native of Memphis, and has a BA in history from Yale. He is a past fellow of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Japan Society, and a media fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. He is an adviser and board member of the Mayborn Journalism School's annual conference on Literary Non-fiction. Hampton has guest-lectured at Columbia University, Yale, Stanford, Colorado College, SMU, the Autry Museum of the American West, and the National World War II Museum, among other institutions. He has appeared as a guest on such national broadcasts as *The American Experience*, the *Today Show*,* Book TV*, the History Channel,* Fresh Air*, CNN, CBS *Sunday Morning*, *The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer*, and NPR's *All Things Considered*.