Heather Wagner
Heather Wagner credits her mother, Jane Philo, with inspiring her career in victims' rights law. Now retired, Philo spent 23 years working with victims of domestic violence in Biloxi, and Wagner saw the results of abuse first hand. "When she came and picked me up from school, that's where I went, to the shelter," she says.
Marley Le
"I did all the hard work, and she looks just like Scot. She's precious, but she looks just like him," Marley Le, owner of Fondren Nails, says of her now four-week-old infant, Elizabeth Ann, as she shows off pictures of her fiancé Scot holding the newborn.
Chuck Culpepper
Saint Alexis Episcopal Church is in the heart of Jackson, just down the street from Hal and Mal's.
Toni Cooley
Toni Cooley was born in Chicopee, Mass., but was raised as an Air Force brat in Massachusetts, North Dakota, New Jersey, Mississippi and New Jersey again.
Louie Miller
Mississippi Sierra Club Director Louie Miller, 50, is nothing if not a pit fighter. He might smile for his pictures, but don't be fooled. Miller can be foul-mouthed and irascible, a product of conference-room shouting matches and broken-bottle, barroom-style fights in the hallways of the Mississippi State Capitol.
Anna Lee Dillon
Anna Lee Dillon, 25, knows that perseverance is key to making a change. When her father, Sherman Lee Dillon, founded Jackson's Earth Day festival 15 years ago, it was a decidedly intimate affair.
Ann Hendrick
Ann Hendrick, 46, remembers the "time of chaos" when Mississippi schools belatedly integrated.
Thabi Moyo
"I didn't know what I wanted to do when I first went to college," Thabi Moyo, 26, says, reminiscing about the spiral of events that led her to her current jobs as festival coordinator of the Crossroads Film Festival and cultural manager for the Canton Visitor's Bureau.
Tiara Robinson
When she walked into the front office of Wingfield High School, she gracefully introduced herself. "Hi, I'm Tiara Robinson," she said with a huge smile and firm handshake. This small gesture told me that Robinson is a person with high standards.
Betsy Bradley
In a hard hat and heels, Betsy Bradley artfully maneuvered past the piles of rubble, plywood gangplanks laid over shallow ditches, and piles of sand and sawdust that surround the construction site of the new Mississippi Museum of Art.
Tekla Sanders
Tekla Sanders fairly shone on the sunny day when we met for lunch, her glossy curls framing her expressive eyes and wide smile. At 27, she still considers herself a newly-wed after 18 months of marriage, and she's expecting her first baby, a boy already named David Caleb, in May. Sanders' mother has 12 siblings, 10 of them girls, so "the fact that we're having a boy is very big news," Sanders said. Her mother wants to see the proof for herself.
Crafton Beck
In seventh grade, Crafton Beck agreed to play an instrument he had never heard of before. Beck had wanted to play the trumpet, but the band director at his middle school in West Memphis, Ark., said to him: "Son, you can't play the trumpet, you've got braces. How about the oboe or the clarinet?" Beck had no idea what either instrument looked or sounded like, so when the band director suggested the clarinet, he agreed. Years later, at Ohio State University, where he had received a scholarship to study clarinet, Beck finally parted with his arbitrarily acquired instrument and found his true vocation—conducting.
Althea Stewart
"I wear a lot of hats," Althea Stewart says. When Jim Hill students want to get something going at their school, they usually call on 39-year-old Stewart, who already sits on the Black History committee, is a cheerleading coach, coordinates homecoming and organizes all the school dances.
Nancy King
Nandy's Candy Store looks exactly how an old-fashioned candy store should. The floors are old hardwood, and the only thing that keeps customers from reaching their hands right in and grabbing whichever sweet confection tempts them is the domed glass over the display case. And as one of the customers who walks in on a lazy Saturday morning says, the place smells so sweet and sugary, "I probably gained five pounds just from breathing the air." Nancy V. King, the owner of Nandy's, wouldn't have it any other way.
Ruben Rodriguez-Santos
Ruben Rodriguez-Santos, 31, lives for family. He beams when talking about his 3-year-old son, Ruben Alexander. Hopping up from the booth near the front door, which allows a constant stream of customers in and out, Rodriguez-Santos goes to retrieve his uncle, Alex Sivira, from the back.