Journalist James L. Dickerson has published numerous biographies and histories, including Dixie’s Dirty Secret: How the Government, the Media, and the Mob Reshaped the Modern Republican Party Into the Image of the Old Confederacy, Yellow Fever: A Deadly Disease Poised to Kill Again, and The Hero Among Us: Memoirs of an FBI Witness Hunter. An award-winning journalist, he has worked as a staff writer for three Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers, The Commercial Appeal (Memphis), the Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News (Jackson, MS) and the Delta Democrat-Times (Greenville, MS). He is a leading writer of civil rights history and organized crime in the South. His writing is listed in the FBI’s Bibliography Related to Crime Scene Interpretation with Emphases in Forensic Geotaphonomic and Forensic Archaeological Field Techniques, compiled by Special Agent Michael J. Hochrein. He is a former book critic for the Toronto Star, the Baltimore Sun, the Nashville Tennessean, BookPage, and the Jackson Free Press. He is the former publisher and editor of The New Orleans Review of Books. Attorney Alex A. Alston (1936-2019) is a past president of the Mississippi Bar Association who has taught and written extensively on issues of trial advocacy. He grew up in the Mississippi Delta, attended Millsaps College and the University of Mississippi Law School. He was first in his class and editor of the law journal. Known as a “lawyer’s lawyer,” he was a member of the American College of Trial Lawyers and American Board of Trial Advocates. One of his greatest honors was his firm receiving the John Minor Wisdom Award for Public Service and Professionalism Award and the American Bar Association's Pro Bono Public Service Award.