Jessie L. Embry is the associate director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University. She was a member of the first oral history class sponsored by the Redd Center in 1973 and became the director of the oral history program in 1979. She has written several books, including Mormons & Polygamy (Setting the Record Straight) and Black Saints in a White Church: Contemporary African American Mormons, and is co-editor of Utah in the Twentieth Century.