Linda Haac is an award-winning writer and communications expert who has taught at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has written for Newsweek, Southern Living, The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune, among many other magazines and newspapers. She has won two Blumenthal Awards for creative nonfiction and a North Carolina Writers’ Network Award, and is the author of the North Carolina Cultural Directory. In addition, she has received numerous international and national professional communications awards.

"I happen to live in the Paris of the Piedmont, although I never intended such a thing. My life just turned out that way. Even if you wanted to, you wouldn’t find any Left Bank here or Eiffel Tower or tourist boat plying the Seine River. We do have a fiberglass pig that sits atop one of our more popular restaurants. The pig glows a fleshy, phosphorescent pink each night, and is considered, at least among some of us, one of our more significant monuments."