Ms. Stack (Ph.D. Illinois) is Director of the Center for the Study of the Family and the State at Duke University where she is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Anthropology. The author of All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community, and Holding On To The Land and The Lord, with Robert Hall, she has written numerous articles on family policy, child welfare and child custody. She is currently engaged in research on the construction of gender, and on the return migration of black families and children from the urban northeast to southern cities and rural communities.