Keri Leigh Merritt, Ph.D., is a historian, writer, and filmmaker based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, as well as co-editor of Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power (2019), and After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America (2022). During 2021-2022, Merritt was an Antibigotry Fellow for the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. She is currently finishing a new book, An Inconvenient Woman: The Life and Work of Lillian Smith for St. Martin’s Press (2025) and is also working on a new documentary, The Civil War and the Fight for the Soul of America.