Ozarks RFD

Jim Hamilton was brought up on a small dairy farm in southern Dallas County near Elkland, Missouri. In 1970-71 he was editor of the Southwest Missouri State College Standard, and from 1971 to 1974 he served his country as a U.S. Air Force journalist and base newspaper editor. After earning a BA in writing at Southwest Missouri State University in 1974, he worked as a news editor at the Bolivar Herald-Free Press. In 1977 he returned to SMSU for a master's degree and then began a 24-year stint as editor and publisher of the Buffalo Reflex. For more than forty years, Hamilton produced weekly editorial columns, and a collection of these was published as The River of Used To Be in 1994. Hamilton was inducted into the Regional Media Hall of Fame in 2016.

Phillip Howerton is professor of English at Missouri State University-West Plains. His essays, reviews, and poems have appeared in numerous journals and books, such as American History through Literature, Arkansas Review, Big Muddy, Christian Science Monitor, Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture, Journal of Kentucky Studies, Midwest Quarterly, Red Rock Review, Slant, and Writers of the American Renaissance. He is a co-founder and poetry editor of Cave Region Review and general editor of Elder Mountain: A Journal of Ozarks Studies. His poetry collection, The History of Tree Roots, was published by Golden Antelope Press in 2015, and his The Literature of the Ozarks: An Anthology was published by University of Arkansas Press in 2019, a project for which he received the Missouri Literary Award from the Missouri Library Association.