CREATOR, PRODUCER and NARRATOR

Alvarez is Associate Director of the MFA program at Sewanee, the University of the South. A veteran journalist and researcher, she served as a researcher and agent for photographers and for the speakers’ bureau at the National Geographic Society. Prior to that, she was news director at WXQR, North Carolina. Alvarez has a BA in Journalism and English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from Sewanee. She recently served on the board of Humanities Tennessee.

DIGITAL HUMANITIES EXPERT and PRODUCER

Hannah Huber teaches English, literature, and digital humanities classes and is the Digital Technology Leader and Project Administrator for the Center for Southern Studies at Sewanee, the University of the South. Dr. Huber earned her PhD in English from the University of South Carolina. Her work has appeared in multiple scholarly journals, including Studies in American Fiction and The Dictionary of Literary Biography. She is the Editor of Studies in American Naturalism and author of Sleep Fictions: Rest and Its Deprivations in Progressive-Era Literature.

WRITER and PRODUCER

A widely read journalist and previous deputy editor of Atlanta Magazine and the Chicago Reader, Worley focuses on the intersection of race, ecology, and historical memory. His work has been published in New York Magazine, the Drift, Lapham's Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Chicago Tribune, Conde Nast Traveler, Epicurious, and Canopy Atlanta. Worley earned his BA in History and Religious Studies at Macalester College. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Sewanee, the University of the South.

WRITER

Karla Diggs received her BA from Meredith College in Raleigh, where she was the first African-American to graduate with a degree in Theater. She continued her studies in New York City at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, where she studied musical theater, and earned a Certificate of Completion of the Integrated Program. Cotton Club Princess, which was inspired by her experiences in New York and her conservatory training, is Karla's first published work. She recently completed her MFA at Sewanee, the University of the South and is currently at work on her next novel.

VOICE OF ELY GREEN

A native of Houston, TX, Manuel graduated from Sewanee, the University of the South with a degree in English Literature in 1980 and an MFA in 2023. He served for twenty years with the U.S. Navy in numerous global deployments, including Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Following his retirement from the Navy, he worked as a civil servant with the U.S. Department of Defense. He is currently working on his first series of short stories, the first of which will be published in 2024.

AUDIO ENGINEER AND MIXER

Crouch studied film and TV at New York University with a minor in computer science and math. Now based in California, Crouch is a musician, writer, and artist with a passion for audio production, animation, travel climbing, and caffeine. He’s happy to be back in the studio after a season doing trail work and conservation in the great outdoors of Oregon.

COMPOSER

Rimkus is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Sewanee. She is an award-winning American composer of choral, vocal and chamber works who brings a wide range of influences to her music, from ars antiqua and ars nova polyphony to Balkanand Scandinavian folk traditions and many other sources. Her work often explores issues such as communication, belonging, and relationship to the environment through use of musical layering and contradiction. Her choral and vocal works have been commissioned and performed extensively across the United States, the United Kingdom and beyond.