People like Jamie Kornegay

Curtis Wilkie (born 1940) is an American journalist, college professor and historian of the American South. He is a Fellow of the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics at the University of Mississippi, and author of numerous books including Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South. Historian Douglas Brinkley has written that, "Over the past four decades no reporter has critiqued the American South with such evocative sensitivity and bedrock honesty as Curtis Wilkie."

Wilkie was born in Greenville, Mississippi in 1940. During World War II, he lived at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where his parents worked as civilians in the Manhattan Project. After his father died in a fire in Greenville in 1947, he spent the majority of his childhood in Summit, Mississippi, where his mother was a schoolteacher and his stepfather was the town's Presbyterian minister. He graduated from Corinth High School in 1958 and from the University of Mississippi in 1963 with a bachelor's degree in journalism.