Latria Graham is a contributing editor for Garden & Gun and she has written for Southern Living, the Oxford American and many other outlets.

Rick Bragg has a Pulitzer Prize, a slew of bestselling books, and a lifetime of Southern stories spilling out of his head.

Charles Bolden flew on four space shuttle missions, helped deploy the Hubble Space Telescope, and was later in charge of NASA under President Obama. He is one of the lucky few who have seen our planet as a blue ball through a window. He talked to Tommy Tomlinson in the latest SouthBound.

Roy Wood Jr. has spent a career telling jokes with sharp edges. He grew up in Birmingham and has spent more than 20 years doing stand-up, returning again to his experiences as a Black man and a Southerner. For the last five years he has also been a correspondent for “The Daily Show,” often coming back down South to poke at our contradictions and absurdities.

Issac Bailey has had to jump a lot of hurdles.

You can’t understand the South without trying to understand Charleston, South Carolina.

Anthony Hamilton, the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter from Charlotte, has spent his career working a fertile patch of rhythm and blues.

Fawn Weaver is the author of a best-selling book on happy marriages. Her husband is a movie exec. They were happy and comfortable in Los Angeles. But then she read a story about a former slave named Nearest Green, who taught his method of making Tennessee whiskey to a young businessman named Jack Daniel. Weaver longed to know more.

Eddie Glaude, the chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton, is the author of a new book called “Begin Again,” about the writer James Baldwin, and how his work reflects on modern race relations in America.

The links to the South’s Confederate past are beginning to come down – some by law, some by force. But this part of the country is still strewn with memorials to the Lost Cause – from monuments in town squares to the names of parks and streets and schools.