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April 26-28, 2024

Word of South

Sheri Castle

Sheri Castle is the host of The Key Ingredient, a cooking show from PBS. She is also an award-winning professional food writer, recipe developer, and cooking teacher known for melding stories, humor, and culinary expertise. Sheri grew up in her beloved Blue Ridge Mountains and now lives in the NC Piedmont. Farmers markets, great stories, […]

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Dana Brooks

Before Dana Brooks became an attorney, she was a paralegal, law firm administrator, mental health counselor and Florida Supreme Court certified family law mediator. Dana attended Pensacola Junior College and Tallahassee Community College before graduating Florida State University, cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in Social Work. She later earned her Masters of Social […]

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Jimmy Fasig

Jimmy Fasig is the leader of the Fasig Brooks personal injury division and lead trial counsel on most of its non-medical malpractice cases. In 2000, he started his law career as a paralegal for what was then Eubanks & Barrett. In his first full year as a lawyer, he litigated a case that resulted in […]

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Sarah Barrios

Originally from Torrington, Connecticut, LA transplant Sarah Barrios began writing songs when she was 13 “after a particularly boring day at home.” She hasn’t stopped writing since, exploring storytelling and the way music can transport listeners to a different world. Barrios draws from a vast spring of influences, from such authors as Jane Austen to […]

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Alison Adderley

Alison J. Adderley is a Professor of Economics at Valencia College in Orlando, FL. Her academic career includes serving as an Academic Dean, Dean of Students and Collegewide Dean of Enrollment Management. She has degrees from Brown University and the University of South Florida, with doctoral work in Higher Education Administration. Outside of work and […]

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Kaleb Thompkins

Kaleb Thompkins is a native of Tallahassee, Florida where he grew up playing music in his family’s church. Kaleb is a young bassist who plays various genres of music including Jazz, R&B/Funk, Gospel, and Rap. Kaleb has been inspired by B.B. King, James Brown, Miles Davis, and Marvin Gaye. Kaleb is currently a third year […]

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Vincent Herring

Vincent Herring started playing saxophone at the age of 11 in school bands and studying privately at Dean Frederick’s School of Music in Vallejo, CA. At the age of 16, Herring was studying at California State University at Chico on a music scholarship. A year later he had won a berth in the United States Military Academy Band […]

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Sid Bedingfield

Sid Bedingfield is co-editor and contributor to Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Demand for a New America. The collection, co-edited by Kathy Roberts Forde, examines the overlooked political influence of white journalists in the rise of Jim Crow rule in the New South – and how Black journalists fought valiantly to […]

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David Powell

A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and the Columbia Journalism School, David Powell worked as a reporter for ten years, most of that with the Associated Press in New York, Miami, and Tallahassee. After earning a law degree from Florida State University, he practiced law for thirty years at the Tallahassee firm […]

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Cedric Watson

One of the brightest young talents to emerge in Cajun, Creole and Zydeco (Louisiana French) music over the last decade, Cedric Watson is a four-time Grammy-nominated fiddler, singer, accordionist & songwriter with seemingly unlimited potential. Originally from San Felipe, TX (population 868), Cedric made his first appearance at the age of 19 at the Zydeco […]

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