Sheila Simmons is passionate about cooking and cookbooks. In her travels, when people come to stay at her rambling house in the country, when entertaining, and especially when attending church events, the subject will all the time, eventually, turn to recipes. In 2006, she left her Associate Publisher position at Quail Ridge Press (Brandon, MS) to focus her passion on Great American Publishers where she is Publisher and coowner at the side of husband Roger Simmons. Sheila is also coauthor of the STATE HOMETOWN COOKBOOK SERIES, creator of Kitchen Memories Cookbook, and Children’s Director for Mt Pisgah Baptist Church (Brandon, MS). She lives in Lena, Mississippi with her husband Roger and son Nicholas. Her firstborn son, Ryan, lives close-by with his wife, Shelbie and Sheila s first grandchild, Trace Warner Williams. Along with publishing, cooking, and collecting recipes, Sheila enjoys spending time with family, reading, collecting first-edition books, and classic cars. Kent Whitaker (East Ridge, TN) has taken his down-home, Southern-style cooking to an art form. He’s the creator of a lot of titles in the State Hometown Cookbook Series plus two additional cookbooks, Smoke in the Mountains and Checkered Flag Cooking, in addition to several non-cookbook titles. Kent has appeared on the Food Network and other network television stations and often hosts cooking classes during the South. He writes cooking columns for a variety of newspapers and magazines. Kent and his wife Ally live in East Tennessee with one son, Macee, a Golden Retriever named Moses and a Shitzu named Lucy.