Jennifer V. Cole spent nearly a decade getting to know the intricacies of the South at Southern Livingmagazine, where she served as Deputy Editor and where her annual Top 100 Southern Restaurants and Best New Restaurant lists were considered the final word on where to eat in the South. Her writing appears widely in other publications. A native of Mississippi, she spent eight years in New York City, where she annually had live crawfish flown up for her birthday boil--she purged them in her bathtub, to the chagrin of her roommates. She now lives in Louisiana.