The featured authors were paired for this conference because they have both Missouri and Southern connections. Kate Chopin is a native of St. Louis and spent much of her life there; William Faulkner is the focus of the Louis Daniel Brodsky Collection, now owned by Southeast Missouri State University. Additionally, both authors lived in and wrote about New Orleans, and their greatest works are set in a South defined by its troubled history and the impact of that history upon issues of race, gender, socio-economic class, and the environment. The essays in the collection shed light on these connections, and many other topics.