Professor McKay Jenkins is a journalist and scholar of American literature, specializing in environmental studies, nonfiction writing, and the history and literature of race relations. He has a B.A. in English from Amherst College (1985), a Masters in journalism from Columbia University (1987), and a PhD in English from Princeton (1996). A former staff writer for the Atlanta Constitution, he is the author of The South in Black and White: Race, Sex and Literature in the 1940s (University of North Carolina Press, 1999);The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone (Random House, 2000); The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the US Army's 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler's Europe (Random House, 2003); and Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness, Murder, and the Collison of Cultures in the Arctic, 1913 (Random House, 2005). He is also the editor of The Peter Matthiessen Reader (Vintage, 2000). He teaches classes in journalism and twentieth century American literature.