Jimmie Meese Moomaw was "born and raised" in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Named by her Daddy eighteen years before she was born, she grew up as the only child of alcoholic parents in the Deep South during the 40s and 50s. Though she left Mississippi in the 60s to go to graduate school in Illinois, she never lost touch with her Southern roots.

 

At the end of the "Prologue" to Southern Fried Child, she wrote: "I'll never know for sure who or what I might have been or would have been if I had been born in Connecticut or Detroit, but I am now sure that I am who I am in large measure because I was born in "Home Seeker's Paradise" and lived a Southern fried childhood, complete with horses and healers and heathens and whores and flawed parents who loved me both too much and not enough."

 

Moomaw taught Communication on the college and university level for 40 years. Now retired from teaching, she is a political consultant, writer and popular public speaker living in Avondale Estates, Georgia.