Billy Field is one of the last people on earth to see the meteor shoot across the sky on November 30, 1954, crash through Ann Hodges’ roof, bounce off her floor radio and hit her on her buttocks, making her famous. Billy sold that story to 20th Century Fox. He has written for 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers and the TV series FAME for MGM. He taught screenwriting and documentary film production at The University of Alabama. His student’s films, dealing with Alabama history and Alabama biography, are on their website at LightsCameraAlabama.com.  Billy is launching a new website designed to teach students to gather oral history from their own communities and work with others across the state to tell those stories through poems, fiction, art, music and podcasts. TheStoryAcorn.com, “Carrying Our Stories to the Next Generation.”

Olivia Dunnigan White first saw racial violence when, at age 13, she was playing the piano in church when the preacher had just been beaten by the Klan for urging people to register to vote. She was a nurse in New York when she saw they news report on Bloody Tuesday. She knew she had to come home. She began working with the T.Y Rogers Choir where she and her young choir members sang for many of the most important events in the history of the Movement, including the funerals of Jimmy Lee Jackson and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “My choir members were children,” she says and brave enough to face danger.” She remembers the innocence of their youth and bravery -- going into communities to help with Voter Registration. She remembers Dr. King’s last sermon at her church, First African Baptist, his final message and the song he requested that they sing. “I honor and respect history,” Ms. Dunnigan White says, “and I look forward to America’s young people learning their history from these stories.

Dr. John Giggie, graduate of Princeton University, is with the History Department at the University of Alabama where he is Director of the Summercell Center for the Study of the South. Dr. Giggie’s areas of expertise are Southern History, Civil Rights, African-American History and American Religion. He is currently working on a book about Bloody Tuesday with a publication date in 2024, the 60th anniversary of that day in history that so many wanted to forget. Dr. Giggie is excited about project-based learning and discovering new and creative ways to teach and learn history.

Jeanne Field has been in the film business and the music business for 50 years, working as assistant camera on the Academy Award winning documentary Woodstock and production work on Martin Scorsese’s documentary The Last Waltz. Following Woodstock, Jeanne went on tour with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, which led to more work with Neil Young and later with Joni Mitchell. Jeanne has worked in both television and the feature film business, and she’s been an agent for 30 years, representing writers. Jeanne loves books and those who write them and that means she loves you writers out there at The Story Acorn, and she’s excited about the creative possibilities of where all this might take us.

John Binder studied literature at Kenyon College, studied acting in New York and film at New York University. He began his career making documentaries with Michael Wadleigh, working on Academy Award winning documentaries like Woodstock and Marjoe. He wrote screenplays for Robert Altman, wrote and directed the feature film UFOria, and he’s written, directed and produced for television, popular series like The Lazarus Man and Lonesome Dove. John continues to write fiction, screenplays and poetry and looks forward to working with some of you on your journey as writers, poets and historians.