Donald Beagle received his Masters Degree in Library Science from the University of Michigan in 1977, where he won the Hopwood Writing Award. He worked for nearly ten years in Charleston, South Carolina, first as Regional Library Branch Head and then Head of the Main Library in downtown Charleston. In 1997, he moved to the University of North Carolina Charlotte as Head of the Information Commons, and since 2000, he has held the position of Director of Library Services at Belmont Abbey College. Mr. Beagle has written 24 published articles and two books. His new book, Poet of the Lost Cause, a biography of the Civil War poet and Confederate chaplain Fr. Abram J. Ryan, will be published by the University of Tennessee Press.
Born in Gastonia, North Carolina in 1920 and graduating from Belmont Abbey College near Charlotte in 1939, Ralph Ray, Jr. was a distinguished artist of portraits and landscapes and a nationally known illustrator of magazines and books.