MEET THE AUTHORS!

A native of Greenville, Mississippi, Gayden Metcalfe is steeped in the traditions and rituals of the Delta. She was born in Greenwood, Mississippi (but only because family doctor had moved there and her mother, Anne Gayden Call, one of the Delta's great conversationalists, couldn't bear the idea of changing doctors) and grew up in Greenville, where she has risen, as night follows day, from holding down several key offices in Dirt Daubers, a pre-teen garden club, to executing various duties in the Greenville chapter of the Garden Club of America. Gayden has served as vice president of the Delta Council, a

regional organization devoted to economic development, and as publisher of Delta Wildlife magazine. She is especially proud of having been on the founding board of the Greenville Arts Council and her work as the chairman of the St. James Episcopal Church Bazaar. During an expatriate phase, Gayden lived in Atlanta where she worked for Saks Fifth Avenue. She was a member of the Young Designers Board of Genesco. After returning to Mississippi, she married Harley Metcalfe, III, a fourth generation cotton planter. She is the mother of two children, a son and daughter. While they were growing up, she became a devoted homeroom mother, who believed that the secret to being a good mother is a full tank of gas. She is also associated with the Stein Mart Boutique.

Also a native of Greenville, Mississippi, Charlotte Hays is a recovering gossip columnist who now lives in Washington, D.C. Charlotte is a graduate of Rhodes College in Memphis and has lived in New Orleans, New York, and Washington. She got her start in journalism on New Orleans weeklies, writing first for the Vieux Carre Courier and then for Figaro. She wrote “Charlotte’s Web,” a thrice weekly gossip column for the Washington Times, and later at the New York Daily News. She also wrote the “Transom” column for the New York Observer. Charlotte has been published in Town & Country, the New Republic, the Washington Post’s Book World, Spy, National Review, and New York magazine. Charlotte has just completed her second book on glamorous marriages.