1. Please tell us your full name and state and provide a sentence describing who you are for our readers:

Anna Shields, native Alabaman and director of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Honors College.

2. What makes your state distinct?

SHIELDS: Alabama is defined by: its hot humid summers, beautiful rivers and lakes, football, and a church every half-mile.

3. If your state were a person, describe its, his, or her personality:

SHIELDS: If Alabama were a person, he’d be a middle-aged “bidnessman,” gunrack optional on his white Ford-F150, which he drives to his cabin on the lake. He is suspicious of the rest of the world, never goes farther than Atlanta (which he hates when he does have to go there, as do all right-thinking people), and happy to root for his football team (Auburn or Alabama), vote Republican, do his work, and go to church.

4. What’s the funniest thing about your state

SHIELDS: Ricky Bragg, the writer. Funny and poignant at the same time.

7. What’s the biggest misconception about your state?

SHIELDS: That people there are stupid. They may talk funny, and may not go off to Harvard much, but they are not dumb.

9. On a scale of 1 to 5, how crazy are the politics in your state?

1. Model of composure and civility
2. 13-year-olds in a schoolyard
3. Chimpanzee colony
4. Call in the HAZMAT team
5. World War III

SHIELDS: Call it a 4, though I’d like to see the Hazmat team that could take Bama on. I think you really have to throw in George Wallace somewhere as an example of Alabama loony-tune-ness or political insanity. The “segregation now, segregation forever” man defined the state for decades, along with the horror of Bull Connor, and yet he ended his life being elected by huge percentages of the black vote in his last term as governor. In more recent insanity, the major city of Birmingham is about to go bankrupt, and the governor-before-last, Don Siegelman, was indicted and convicted in a highly controversial corruption trial.