Patricia Dixon is associate professor in African-American studies at Georgia State University in Athens, Ga., and co-founder of the African-American Relationships Institute. She contends that a shortage of eligible African-American men, combined with men’s natural tendency to engage in multiple relationships, makes polygamy a practical option for African-Americans.

Rick Ross is founder and executive director of the nonprofit Ross A. Institute, which is based in Jersey City, N.J., and has a mission of studying controversial groups and movements. The institute maintains a database on polygamist groups

James J. Hughes is the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, as well as a bioethicist and sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Help the Child Brides is led by Flora Jessop, who lives in Phoenix, Ariz.

Mary Mackert, a former plural wife who lives in Utah, wrote and published The Sixth of Seven Wives: Escape From Modern-Day Polygamy (xpolygamist.com, 2001).

Mark Henkel of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, is a national polygamy advocate and founder of TruthBearer.org, a non-Mormon organization that promotes Christian polygamy. Contact through the website.

Dorothy Allred Solomon, a monogamist who is the 28th of the 48 children born to the late polygamist Mormon Rulon Allred, is the author of Predators, Prey and Other Kinfolk: Growing Up in Polygamy (W.W. Norton and Co., 2003). She lives in the Salt Lake City area. She says that because of secrecy and isolation, as well […]

John R. Llewellyn is a retired Salt Lake County, Utah, sheriff’s lieutenant who extensively investigated polygamy cults. A former polygamist, he wrote Polygamy Under Attack: From Tom Green to Brian David Mitchell; A Teenager’s Tears: When Parents Convert To Polygamy; and Murder of a Prophet: The Dark Side of Utah Polygamy. Llewellyn is now a monogamist and muckraker, and he […]

Historian D. Michael Quinn is the author of several scholarly books about Mormons, including Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Signature Books, 1998). In 1997, the American Historical Association gave him a best-book award for Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (University of Illinois Press, 1996). He has worked as an independent scholar since 1988, when […]