Frye Gaillard is a writer in residence at the University of South Alabama and award-winning author of more than 20 books, including Watermelon Wine: The Spirit of Country Music, The Quilt: And the Poetry of Alabama Music, Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family’s Civil War Letters, The Books That Mattered: A Reader’s Memoir, and Go South to Freedom, all published by NewSouth Books. His most recent releases include A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope and Innocence Lost and The Slave Who Went to Congress. He is the winner of the Lillian Smith Award, the Clarence Cason Award for Non-Fiction, the Alabama Library Association Book of the Year Award, and the 2016 Eugene Current-Garcia Award For Distinction in Literary Scholarship.