Emerson served as a SEAL operator at SEAL Team Three, the NSA, and SEAL Team Six. He is the founder of Escape the Wolf, which focuses on crisis management for global companies both large and small. He’s the bestselling author of the 100 Deadly Skills series, The Right Kind of Crazy, and the forthcoming The Rugged Life. He is also the host of the Can You Survive This Podcast?, the producer and host of the 100 Deadly Skills: Combat Edition Series for the Warrior Poet Society, and a member of the hit tv show SAS Australia. He is the only SEAL operator to have been inducted into the International Spy Museum.

Rick Bragg (1959- ) is a noted journalist and writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for his work with the New York Times. His most lasting contribution, however, is likely his trilogy of family stories. Initially, Bragg believed these stories would be important only to himself and his immediate family, but they have garnered wide appeal among people who see themselves and their own families reflected in the characters and settings.

Works:

All Over but the Shoutin' (1997)
Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg (2000)
Ava's Man (2001)
I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story (2003)
The Prince of Frogtown (2008)
Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story (2014)
My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South (2015)
The Best Cook in the World: Tales From My Momma's Table (2018)

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults.

Mr. Stevenson has argued and won multiple cases at the United States Supreme Court, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia and a landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-imprisonment-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger. Mr. Stevenson and his staff have won reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 135 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced.

Mr. Stevenson has initiated major new anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts that challenge inequality in America. He led the creation of two highly acclaimed cultural sites which opened in 2018: the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. These new national landmark institutions chronicle the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation, and the connection to mass incarceration and contemporary issues of racial bias. Mr. Stevenson is also a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.

Frye Gaillard, writer in residence at the University of South Alabama and former Southern Editor at the Charlotte Observer, is the author of more than 30 books, exploring themes of social justice and Southern music, religion, politics, and culture. His award-winning titles have ranged across the genres of history, memoir, journalism, and historical novels for young readers. Three of his books have been adapted as public television documentaries, and Gaillard has co-authored the script for two of those, including the Emmy-winning "In the Path of the Storms." His critically praised books have included A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, an NPR Great Read of 2018 and winner of the Fitzgerald Museum Literary Prize; Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award; The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, for which Gaillard received the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Humanitarian of the Year Award; and Watermelon Wine: The Spirit of Country Music, featured in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. Gaillard has co-written songs that have made the U.S. folk and country music charts and appeared in nationally distributed music videos and documentary films, and his byline has appeared in such publications as The Bitter Southerner, The Oxford American, The Washington Post, Sojourners, Journal of American History, Outside Magazine, The Progressive, Parade, and Alabama Heritage.Gaillard has served as writer in residence for the Honors College at Johnson C. Smith University (HBCU), and Queens University in Charlotte, NC. His other recognitions have included the Clarence Cason Award, the Eugene Current-Garcia Award, and the Alabama Governor's Award for the Arts.
​He has contributed to anthologies published by Oxford University Press, the University of North Carolina Press, the University of Alabama Press, and the University Press of Mississippi.

James Wayne Flynt (born October 4, 1940) is University Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Auburn University.[1] He has won numerous teaching awards and been a Distinguished University Professor for many years. His research focuses on Southern culture, Alabama politics, Southern religion, education reform, and poverty. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Online Encyclopedia of Alabama. Flynt received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard College (shortly before its reorganization as Samford University) in 1961 before taking his Master of Science (1962) and Ph.D. (1965) from Florida State University. After teaching at Samford for 12 years, he joined the faculty at Auburn University in 1977, where he remained until his retirement in 2005. He was a friend of author Harper Lee.

Katherine Clark

I was born in Tuscaloosa after my mother went into labor at an Alabama homecoming game against Miami. (Joe Namath was the quarterback for the Crimson Tide.) When my father finished law school at Bama, my parents moved back to their hometown of Birmingham, where I was raised and attended The Altamont School. The education I received there from an extraordinary faculty, especially the beloved Martin Hames, was better than what I got later in college at Harvard. Truly. After graduating from the Emory of the North, I then went to Emory in Atlanta for graduate school, on a Woodruff Fellowship. With a dissertation on William Faulkner, I earned a Ph.D. in American literature.

Although I loved being a college professor, especially in New Orleans, where I taught for 13 years, I have wanted to be a writer since first grade. Something clicked in my six year-old brain when I read my very first book, Sammy the Seal. I can remember thinking at the time: I want to be one of those people who puts the words on the page.
As an aspiring novelist, I was lucky to cross paths with two fascinating Southern characters, the black granny midwife Onnie Lee Logan and the Capote-esque bon vivant Eugene Walter. Tape-recording and editing their life stories gave me an apprenticeship for constructing narratives, and led to my first two publications: Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife’s Story and Milking the Moon: A Southerner’s Story of Life on this Planet.

I had hoped to do a similar oral biography with Martin Hames, but when he passed away, I understood the time had come to write a novel. The result is The Headmaster’s Darlings, whose main character is a tribute to my former mentor and the importance of great teachers. During the writing of this book, I quickly realized that one novel was not going to do justice to my subject matter. I needed a series of novels to demonstrate how exceptional teachers can lead a community even in the deepest South to grow and change for the better. The upshot is the Mountain Brook Series, to be published by Pat Conroy’s Story River Books imprint at the University of South Carolina Press. So far this series totals four novels, with the first coming out in August 2015.

Kim Cross is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist known for meticulously reported narrative nonfiction. A full-time freelance writer, she has bylines in the New York Times, Nieman Storyboard, Outside, Bicycling, Garden & Gun, CNN.com, ESPN.com, and USA Today. Her work has been recognized in “Best of” lists by the the New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, The Sunday Longread, Longform, Apple News Audio, and Best American Sports Writing. She teaches Feature Writing for Harvard Extension School.