"My life as a writer has deep roots in Birmingham—in Norwood Elementary School, in Phillips High School, in Norwood Methodist Church, and in Birmingham-Southern. I studied with professors who not only taught me how to read literature in an analytic way—Dean Cecil Abernethy, Dr. Bert Ownby, Dr. Howard Creed—but I also received inspiration from my professors in the writing of poetry, short stories, and a full-length play, starring Pamela Walburt and directed by myself. I found the subject matter for the play Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni in a history class taught by Dr. Henry Randall; Dr. Arnold Powell taught the playwriting course; Department Chair Richebourg Gaillard McWilliams taught the fiction class, and Professor Leon Driskell encouraged my poetry writing. My talented and often brilliant classmates not only spurred me on in the classroom, but we also inspired one another with a kind of high seriousness of purpose and honesty of introspection that transcended competitiveness. Let us all express our gratitude with our support for the unique educational opportunity for which BSC proudly stands."

Naslund wrote her ninth book, The Fountain of St. James Court; or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman, in the fall of 2012. Her other books have been national bestsellers and/or selected as Notable/Best Books of the year by major newspapers such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Time magazine, and translated into many languages.

• Ice Skating at the North Pole (1989)
• Sherlock in Love (1993)
• Ahab's Wife (1999)
• The Disobedience of Water: Stories and Novellas (1999)
• Four Spirits: A Novel (2003)
• High Horse - Contemporary Writing by the MFA Faculty of Spalding University (2005)
• Abundance (2006)
•  Adam & Eve (2010)

 A recipient of the Harper Lee Award, she is writer-in-residence at the University of Louisville and program director of the Spalding University brief-residency MFA in Writing. She was a former Kentucky poet laureate.

 "The uniqueness of BSC is that students are taught to use their minds. We learned that success will flow from that."

His advice to aspiring journalists is to write a lot and to stay encouraged. "Except for the geniuses like Hemingway or Faulkner, we all have some bad writing that has to get out of us before we get to the good stuff."

He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1992 for "Grady's Gift," and is former executive editor of The New York Times.

His classmates include authors Charles Gaines and Sena Jeter Naslund.

 Raines is also the author of:

My Soul is Rested (1977-reprinted in 1983)

Whiskey Man (1977)

Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis (1993-reprinted in 2006)

The One That Got Away (2006

Rebecca Gilman's plays include Spinning Into Butter, Boy Gets Girl, The Crowd You're In With, Dollhouse, A True History of the Johnstown Flood, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Blue Surge, and The Glory of Living.  Her plays have received numerous productions at regional theatres and abroad, including productions at the Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre, Lincoln Center Theatre, the Public Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, New York Theatre Workshop, and Manhattan Class Company.

Rebecca is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Prince Prize for Commissioning New Work, the Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright, the George Devine Award, the Edgerton Foundation New American Plays Award, five Joseph Jefferson Awards, and the Harper Lee Award. She was named a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for her play, The Glory of Living.

Rebecca is the recipient of a TCG Global Connections Grant and a Creative Writing Grant from the American Scandinavian Foundation for work on two new plays in collaboration with theatre companies in Gothenburg, Sweden: Teater Durken and Göteborgs Dramatiska Teater.

Ms. Gilman is an Artistic Associate at the Goodman Theatre, a Council Member of the Dramatists Guild of America, and an Associate Professor of playwriting and screenwriting at Northwestern University. In 2014, she will have two new plays produced. In January, her play, Luna Gale, will premiere at the Goodman Theatre, under the direction of Robert Falls. And in March, her play, Soups, Stews, and Casseroles: 1976, will premiere at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis under the direction of Seth Gordon.

Gin Phillips is the author of three books. Her first novel, The Well and the Mine, won the 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award. The Well and the Mine has now been published in eight different countries. Gin's second novel, Come in and Cover Me, was released in 2012, and her children's book, The Hidden Summer, was released in 2013. 

As a political journalism major, Gin spent plenty of time in both the political science department and the English department. She has been a professional writer--one way or another--ever since graduation. As a freelance magazine writer, she interviewed John Cleese, George Stephanopoulos, James Carville, Sally Ride, DeeDee Myers, and Letitia Baldrige. 

Gin has also founded a nonprofit creative writing program, Wordsmiths, for Birmingham City students.

You can find out more about her books on her Web site at www.ginphillips.com .

Murphy is a best-selling author, food critic, and decorated naval officer. "America's funniest food critic" has appeared on the TODAY Show, Fox & Friends, CNN, Sirius/XM, Food Talk, Car Talk, NPR, and the Speed Channel. He served as the travel editor, food critic, and national spokesperson for Southern Living. He then joined Forbes, where he covered many of America's best-known entrepreneurs. As a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy, he has served on four continents and has many military decorations. He has an MBA from the University of Oxford, is a member of Exeter College, and was elected by the university as the MBA of the Year. He is a cum laude graduate of BSC, where he majored in English.

• Southern Living Off the Eaten Path: Second Helpings: Tasty Eats and Delicious Stories from the South's Less-Traveled Trails (2013)
• Southern Living Off the Eaten Path: Favorite Southern Dives and 150 Recipes that Made Them Famous (2011)
• I Love You - Now Hush (2010, with Melinda Rainey Thompson)

Carolyn Hembree's debut collection, Skinny, was published by Kore Press in 2012. Individual poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Puerto del Sol, and Verse Daily, among other journals and anthologies. Her poetry has received a PEN Writers Grant, a Southern Arts Federation Grant, and a Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship Award in Literature. Her manuscript Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine & Other Ways to Escape a Plague was a 2012 finalist for the Tupelo Press and Switchback Books competitions.

Carolyn studied English and creative writing with Professor Sprayberry and acting with Professor Litsey. Following her graduation from 'Southern, Carolyn moved to New York by way of Greenville, South Carolina. During these lean years, she found employment as a cashier, house cleaner, cosmetics consultant, telecommunicator, actor, receptionist, paralegal, and freelance writer. On a train ride from Emily Dickinson's Amherst, she decided to pursue the vocation of poetry writing.

Carolyn received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. During her time in the desert, she studied with poets Jon Anderson, Barbara Cully, Jane Miller, and Steve Orlen.

She teaches at the University of New Orleans and serves as Poetry Editor of Bayou Magazine.

The title character of Skinny leaves the South and a beloved, dying matriarch for New York City, a "far-off island dream." Through an expansive dramatis personae, the poems offer polyphonic responses to harrowing encounters. Here is a life at once immediate and recognizable yet imbued with nostalgia: silent film intertitles, biplanes transmissions, the broken Welsh of ancestors. The book incorporates ekphrastic pieces, prose poems, dramatic monologues, odes, elegies, a pastoral, and a word problem, among other free verse experiments. Despite familiar allusions and forms, the collection is otherworldly. Regionalisms of the Deep South combine with the idiolect of a particular family to form a grammar as fractured as the landscape it describes.

Finley holds an MFA from the University of Alabama, and an MA from Birmingham-Southern. She is the author of a memoir, Two of Em In There: A Southern Writer's Journey to and Through the First Year of Twin Motherhood, published in 2011, and a volume of poetry, Third Girl, released from Plan B Press in 2010. Evans divides her time unevenly and joyfully, between writing poetry, spending time with her husband Neal Evans ('94) and sons, Max and Harry (10), and attempting to manage the well-being of their household, which also includes their two dogs, Thelma Lou (2) and Fife (17). She has been published in several literary magazines since she graduated from 'Southern, and one poetry anthology, entitled Sad Little Breathings and Other Acts of Ventriloquism (2001), edited by Heather McHugh. Her poetry most recently appears in Louisville Review and The New Renaissance. She lives in Birmingham.

For more info on Evans' work vist her Goodreads page.

Anna Froula is the coeditor of two books (Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the "War on Terror," Continuum, 2010 and It's a Mad World: The Cinema of Terry Gilliam,Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2013) and the author of several book chapters and journal articles about war culture, gender, trauma, and zombies. Her forthcoming publications include an article about The Daily Show alum Rob Riggle's satire and chapters on representations of women soldiers in popular culture in World War II and the "War on Terror." She was recently promoted to Associate Professor of Film Studies at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC.

An English major and biology minor, Anna was involved in BSC's service-learning trips to Zimbabwe and Calcutta and worked in the non-profit sector before attending graduate school at the University of Kentucky, where she earned her MA and PhD.

She currently serves as Associate Editor for Cinema Journal, the journal of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.