New Orleans-based attorney and writer ANTHONY P. DUNBAR is the Lillian Smith Book Award-winning author of books about Mississippi, Appalachia, migrant workers, and the Southern labor movement as well as the acclaimed Tubby Dubonnet mystery series. DAN CARTER is the University of South Carolina Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus. The author and editor of more than forty scholarly articles and seven books including Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South and The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism and the Transformation of American Politics, Carter has received eight major literary prizes including the Lillian Smith, Bancroft, and Robert Kennedy awards as well as a special citation in nonfiction from the Mystery Writers of America. JOHN EGERTON (1935-2013) had been a "professional South-watcher" for half a century. Beginning in high school in the 1950s, through two years in the U.S. Army, five years earning two college degrees, five more as a college news bureau reporter, six as a magazine writer, and for the past thirty-five years as an independent journalist and author, he seldom strayed far from his life’s work: following the social and cultural, political and economic trends that forever have made the American South the unique place that it is, for better and worse. Until the publication of Ali Dubyiah and the Forty Thieves, all his published writing, including more than fifteen books, has been classified as nonfiction. He called his new book "a fable ... a parable ... a cautionary tale" in the genre of "political science-fiction," and claimed that he "did not so much author it as synthesize it from hundreds of sources, compile it, and become by default the one to present it to the reading public. Fables don’t have authors. They’re found, heard, passed down." LESLIE W. DUNBAR, a native of West Virginia, was the director of the Field Foundation and the Southern Regional Council during the turmoil of the 1960s, and has been closely identified with the cause of Southern democracy. The author of several books, most recently, The Shame of Southern Politics, he lives in Washington, D.C. PAUL M. GASTON (1928-2019) was born and reared in Fairhope, Alabama, about which he has written two books. He is also the author of The New South Creed, winner of the Lillian Smith Award for distinguished writing about the South. He is a past president of the Southern Regional Council and has been a frequent visitor in South Africa, both before and after the fall of apartheid. He has received numerous honors for both his professional work and civil rights leadership, including the outstanding professor award from the Commonwealth of Virginia; bridge builder recognition from the city of Charlottesville; legendary civil rights activist from the NAACP; and community leader, from his alma mater, Swarthmore College. SHELDON HACKNEY is currently Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, he served four years as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1993-97); from 1981 to 1993 he was President of the University of Pennsylvania; from 1975 to 1981 he was President of Tulane University. He was on the history faculty at Princeton University from 1965 to 1975, serving as Provost of the University the final three of those years. He is the author of Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton Press, 1969), which was awarded the Beveridge Prize by the American Historical Association as the best book in American History that year and the Sydnor Prize by the Southern Historical Association as the best book in southern history in that two-year period.