Myra Davis-Branic is an educator in South Carolina and author of the books Cornbread My Soul: The Davis Family of Eutawville, South Carolina, and 28 + 1: People to Talk About for Black History Month. She is a member-scholar on the Speakers Bureau for Humanities Out Loud, a project of Humanities South Carolina.

Frye Gaillard, former writer in residence at the University of South Alabama, is the prize-winning author of more than thirty books, including, with Nancy B. Galliard, Lessons from the Big House: One Family's Passage through the History of the South, a Memoir and A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s. He is a member of the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame.

Kern Jackson, director of the African American Studies Program at the University of South Alabama, regularly facilitates conversations about family history and identity in relation to the larger context of slavery and racial justice in the American South. He is coproducer and coauthor of the script for the award-winning documentary Descendant about the last slave ship, Clotilda.