Skip to author’s last name:
Sarah Adlakha is a native of Chicago who now lives along the Mississippi Gulf Coast with her husband, three daughters, two horses, and one dog. She started writing fiction shortly after retiring from her psychiatry practice. Her debut novel, She Wouldn’t Change a Thing, was a CNN most anticipated book of 2021. Midnight on the Marne is her second novel.
Kendra Allen was born and raised in Dallas, TX. She is the recipient of the 2018 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction for her essay collection, When You Learn the Alphabet, awarded by Kiese Laymon. She has been featured on C-SPAN, interviewed in The Rumpus and in Poets & Writers, and her work has been taught by New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds alongside that of Jamaica Kincaid and Eve Ewing, among other distinctions. She is the author of The Collection Plate (Ecco, 2021.)
John Anderson is the youngest child of famed artist Walter Anderson and Agnes Anderson. Anderson, the family curator, grew up in the artistic retreat at Shearwater Pottery in Ocean Springs, MS. For the past several years, Anderson has been the curator or co-curator of over twelve exhibits of his father’s art. Additionally, he has written about his father extensively and participated in the production of several films focused on the work and life of his father.
Jami Attenberg is the New York Times best-selling author of seven books of fiction, including The Middlesteins and All This Could Be Yours and one work of non-fiction, I Came All This Way To Meet You. She has contributed essays to the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, and the Guardian, among other publications. She lives in New Orleans.
Andrew is creator and co-author of the graphic memoir series, MARCH, which chronicles the life of Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis. Co-authored with Rep. Lewis and illustrated by Nate Powell, MARCH is the first comics work to ever win the National Book Award. In 2019, Andrew joined with Kelly Sue Deconnick, Matt Fraction, Valentine DeLandro, and Vaughn Shinall to found Good Trouble Productions (GTP) to produce innovative nonfiction graphic novel and multimedia projects, including RUN, a sequel series to the March trilogy, and Registered, a comic book for the New York City Department of Education about youth voting and distributed as part of the NYCDOE's "Civics for All" curriculum, as well as "The Long March", a large-scale custom art installation and online experience for Ben & Jerry's in Vermont.
Jack Bales retired in August 2020 as Reference and Humanities Librarian Emeritus after working for more than forty years at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Although a librarian by vocation, he is a writer by avocation and has published books as well as numerous articles and essays for books, journals, magazines, literary encyclopedias, and newspapers. His many works on Willie Morris include Willie Morris: An Exhaustive Annotated Bibliography and a Biography (McFarland, 2006), Conversations with Willie Morris (University Press of Mississippi, 2000), and an edited book of Morris's essays, Shifting Interludes (University Press of Mississippi, 2002), which was recently reissued in paperback. His most recent book is The Chicago Cub Shot for Love: A Showgirl's Crime of Passion and the 1932 World Series (2021). Jack lives in Fredericksburg and is the father of two children, Patrick and Laura. When not researching and writing, he enjoys hiking with them, particularly in the Shenandoah Mountains.
Mark Barr's fiction and essays have appeared in Garden & Gun, Wisconsin Review, Poets & Writers, LitHub, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. His debut novel, Watershed (Hub City, 2019), received favorable reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist, and was awarded the 2019 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction, the 2019 Writers' League of Texas Discovery Prize in Fiction, and a bronze IPPY Award for Best First Book. Mark has been awarded fellowships from Blue Mountain Center, I-Park Artists Enclave, Jentel Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Millay Colony, and Yaddo. He lives in Little Rock with his wife and sons.
Scott Barretta, a resident of Greenwood, is a writer/researcher for the Mississippi Blues Trail, the host of Highway 61 on Mississippi Public Broadcasting, and teaches sociology courses about music and popular culture at the University of Mississippi. He's the former editor and and continuing contributor to Living Blues magazine, has written for Oxford American, MOJO, Spin, Mississippi Folklife, and Bitter Southerner, contributed to multiple books about music and edited Conscience of the Folk Revival: The Writings of Israel "Izzy" Young. He co-produced the documentary "Shake 'em On Down" about bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell, and has written exhibits for the B.B. King Museum and Grammy Museum Mississippi. In 2016 he received the Mississippi Governor's Arts Award for Mississippi Heritage, and in 2022 received a Citation of Merit from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.
A native of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, Vishwesh Bhatt has made his home in Oxford, Mississippi, for more than twenty years. As the executive chef of Snackbar, where he has cooked for the last twelve years, he was nominated for People's Best New Chef by Food & Wine and won the 2019 James Beard Award for Best Chef: South.
From the 1980s through the early 2000s, a golden era for southern roots music, producer and three-time Grammy winner Scott Billington recorded many of the period's most iconic artists. Working primarily in Louisiana, Billington produced such giants as Irma Thomas, Charlie Rich, Buckwheat Zydeco, Johnny Adams, Bobby Rush, Ruth Brown, Beau Jocque, and Solomon Burke. The loving and sometimes irreverent profiles in Making Tracks reveal the triumphs and frustrations of the recording process, and that obsessive quest to capture a transcendent performance.
Billington's long working relationships with the artists give him perspective to present them in their complexity-foibles, failures, and fabled feats-while providing a vivid look at the environs in which their music thrived. In addition, Making Tracks provides a widely accessible study in the craft of recording. Details about the technology and psychology behind the sessions abound. Billington demonstrates varying ways of achieving the mutual goal of a great record. He also introduces the supporting cast of songwriters, musicians, and engineers crucial to the magic in each recording session. Making Tracks sings unforgettably like a "from the vault" discovery.
He lives in New Orleans with his wife, the children's musician and author Johnette Downing.
Katie Blount became director of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History February 1, 2015. Blount began her career at MDAH in 1994 in the public information section. She went on to serve as deputy director for communication, overseeing the department’s strategic planning process and working with the team that planned the new Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, which opened in 2017 in celebration of the state bicentennial.
Blount earned her B.A. from the University of Michigan in English and history and her M.A. in southern studies from the University of Mississippi. She lives in Jackson with her husband and their two children.
Matt Bondurant's latest novel Oleander City will be in book stores nationwide June 14, 2022. His previous novels include The Night Swimmer, which was featured in the New York Times Book Review, Outside Magazine, and The Daily Beast, among others. His second novel The Wettest County in the World is an international bestseller, a New York Times Editor's Pick, a San Francisco Chronicle Best 50 Books of the Year, and was made into a feature film (Lawless) starring Shia Labeouf, Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, Gary Oldman, and Guy Pearce. His first novel The Third Translation is an international bestseller, translated into 14 languages worldwide. He has published short stories in such journals as Glimmer Train, The New England Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others, and has written feature articles, and reviews for Outside Magazine, Newsweek, Texas Monthly, Huffington Post, and other media outlets. His non-fiction piece, "The Real Thing" was selected for the 2017 Best Food Writing Anthology. He has sold three original screenplays including development deals for one-hour dramatic television series with HBO/Cinemax and Warner Brothers Television. Matt has appeared on various media outlets including NPR, Radio France, The Discovery Channel, and MSNBC. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
Jason Bouldin began his professional career as a painter in 1991 after a two-year apprenticeship with his father, the esteemed Mississippi portrait painter, Marshall Bouldin. Bouldin’s commissioned portraits hang in such varied locations as the United States Department of Agriculture, Harvard University, Tulane University Law School, the Mississippi State Capitol, and more than a dozen federal courthouses, including portraits of former governor William Winter for the lobby of the William F. Winter Archives and History Building, and Medgar Evers and Myrlie Evers-Williams for the Mississippi Museum of Art. While he is most widely known for his portraiture, Jason’s personal work explores the artist’s relationship to nature.
Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.
Taylor Brown grew up on the Georgia coast. He has lived in Buenos Aires, San Francisco, and the mountains of western North Carolina. He is the recipient of the Montana Prize in Fiction and a three-time finalist for the Southern Book Prize. His novels include Fallen Land, The River of Kings, Gods of Howl Mountain, Pride of Eden, and WINGWALKERS. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.
Rinker Buck began his career in journalism at the Berkshire Eagle and was a longtime staff writer for the Hartford Courant. He has written for Vanity Fair, New York, Life, and many other publications, and his work has won the PEN New England Award, the Eugene S. Pulliam National Journalism Writing Award, and the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Oregon Trail, Flight of Passage, and First Job. He lives in Tennessee.
Kelly Butler is the Barksdale Reading Institutes’s Chief Executive Officer. She holds a bachelor’s degree in special education from the University of Alabama and a master’s degree in administration, planning and social policy from Harvard University. Prior to joining BRI, Kelly served as a teacher in the Greenwich, Conn. public schools, and has worked extensively with a variety of non-profit organizations in social service, health care and education in the areas of program development, support and evaluation.
Jimmy Cajoleas was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He earned his MFA from the University of Mississippi and is the author of five novels for children and young adults. He now lives in New York.
Tracy Carr is the Mississippi Center for the Book Director and the Library Services Director at the Mississippi Library Commission.
Matthew Casey is Associate Professor of History and Director of the School of Humanities at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of Empire's Guest Workers: Haitian Migrants in Cuba during the Age of US Occupation, as well as numerous articles on Caribbean history. He lives in Hattiesburg with his wife and their two children.
Brian Castner is a nonfiction writer, former Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer, and veteran of the Iraq War. His most recent book is Stampede, a new history of the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush. He is also the bestselling author of Disappointment River, All the Ways We Kill and Die, and the war memoir The Long Walk, which was adapted into an opera and named a New York Times Editor's Pick and Amazon Best Book of the Year. His journalism and essays have appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, Esquire, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and on National Public Radio. He is the co-editor of The Road Ahead, a collection of short stories featuring veteran writers, and has twice received grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, to cover the Ebola outbreak in Liberia in 2014, and to paddle the 1200 mile Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean in 2016.
Adam Clay is the author of To Make Room for the Sea (Milkweed Editions, 2020), Stranger (Milkweed Editions, 2016), A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012), and The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). A fifth book of poems, Circle Back, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, Bennington Review, Georgia Review, Boston Review, jubilat, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Recently he received a Literary Arts Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission. An editor of Mississippi Review and a Contributing Editor for Kenyon Review, he directs the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Lesa Cline-Ransome is the award-winning author of many critically acclaimed books for young readers, including Not Playing By the Rules: 21 Female Athletes Who Changed Sports, Young Pele: Soccer's First Star, Before She was Harriet, Overground Railroad, and Game Changers: The Story of Venus and Serena Williams. Her numerous honors include the Jane Addams Honor Award, the Christopher Award, Kirkus Best Book of the Year, SLJ Best Book of Year and three NAACP Image Award nominations. Her debut middle grade novel Finding Langston received the Coretta Scott King Author Honor and the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction. The companion novel is Leaving Lymon. She is currently an SCBWI board member and host of KidLitTV's Past Present: Giving Past Stories New Life. She lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York with her family.
Dr. Michael Cormack is the Deputy Superintendent for Jackson Public Schools. In this role, he develops and executes the district's new strategic plan Excellence of All. Prior to his work in JPS, Michael served as the Chief Executive Officer of the Barksdale Reading Institute, a statewide organization dedicated to improving early literacy and teacher development outcomes in Mississippi. Additionally, Michael served as the principal of Quitman County Elementary School in the Mississippi Delta. His transformative work as principal is profiled in the New York Times bestselling memoir Dispatches from Pluto by Richard Grant.
Eli Cranor played quarterback at every level: peewee to professional, and then coached high school football for five years. These days, he's traded in the pigskin for a laptop, writing from Arkansas where he lives with his wife and kids. His fiction has won The Greensboro Review's Robert Watson Literary Prize and been a runner-up for The Missouri Review's Miller Prize. Eli also writes a nationally syndicated sports column, "Athletic Support," and his craft column, "Shop Talk," appears monthly at CrimeReads. His debut novel, Don't Know Tough, won the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest. Eli is currently at work on his next novel.
David Crews is the Clerk of Court for the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Mississippi. He is a former United States Marshal who spent 12 years with the U.S. Justice Department before joining the Court.
In 1982 David worked with Governor William Winter and others to secure a pioneering piece of legislation that brought a statewide system of kindergartens and compulsory school attendance to Mississippi for the first time.
In his spare time David produced a feature length documentary film, The Toughest Job, which won an Emmy for Best Historical Documentary. He has produced & directed several documentary films. He is the author of The Mississippi Book of Quotations, which is in its second printing.
He serves on the Board of Directors for the Overby Center and is a judge for the Willie Morris Awards for Southern literature.
David graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He is married to the lovely Claire Shelmire Crews. They have two wonderful & gainfully employed children.
Jim Crockett is Professor Emeritus of Accountancy at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), and an Adjunct Professor of Accountancy at The University of Mississippi. He earned the BBA and MBA degrees from the University of Mississippi and the DBA from Mississippi State University. Dr. Crockett has served on the faculty of the University of West Florida and as Chairman of the its Department of Finance and Accounting. He also served as Professor and Director of the School of Professional Accountancy at USM. In 2012 he served as Visiting Professor of Accountancy at Western Kentucky University (WKU. Crockett has been an active member of the Mississippi Society of CPAs (MSCPA), the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), the Institute of Management Accounting (IMA), and the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA). He was the MSCPA’s Educator of the Year in 2005 and Treasurer of the MSCPA in 2006-2007. Crockett has presented many continuing professional education programs on a national basis. He has published three books with the University Press of Mississippi (Operation Pretense, Hands in the Till, and Power Greed Hubris), two monographs, and numerous articles in professional and academic journals. Crockett retired as a Lt. Colonel from the U.S. Air Force Reserve. He is married to the former Dorothy Douglas and they have two grown sons and four grandchildren. Jim is a life-long sports fan.
When she was six years old, Susan Annah Currie spent fifteen months as a patient in the Preventorium Hospital in Magee, Mississippi, where children were allowed visits from parents only twice a month, and adhered to a strict daily routine, called "the Fresh Air Method".
Susan is a native Mississippian, born in Jackson in 1953. She obtained a B.A. in English from Belhaven College, and attended graduate school for English Literature at the University of Mississippi. In 1979, she moved to Ithaca, New York, and obtained a Masters in Library Science from the University of Buffalo. She was an academic librarian for close to thirty years, including Cornell University and SUNY Binghamton University Libraries. In 2009, she was chosen to be the director of the historic Tompkins County Public Library in Ithaca, NY.
Ironically, she now lives less than ten miles away from what was once a Preventorium just outside Ithaca, New York, the Cayuga Nature Center, which opened in 1939 as the Cayuga Preventorium.
Andy Davidson is the Bram Stoker Award nominated author of In the Valley of the Sun, The Boatman's Daughter, and The Hollow Kind. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi. Born and raised in Arkansas, he makes his home in Georgia with his wife, Crystal, and a bunch of cats.
Patrick Dean writes on the outdoors, outdoor athletes, and the environment. He has worked as a teacher, a political media director, and is presently the executive director of a rail-trail nonprofit. An avid trail-runner, paddler, and mountain-biker, he lives with his wife and dogs on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee.
Matt de la Peña is the New York Times Bestselling, Newbery Medal-winning author of seven young adult novels (including Mexican WhiteBoy, We Were Here, and Superman: Dawnbreaker) and six picture books (including Milo Imagines the World and Last Stop on Market Street). In 2016 he was awarded the NCTE Intellectual Freedom Award. Matt received his MFA in creative writing from San Diego State University and his BA from the University of the Pacific where he attended school on a full basketball scholarship. In 2019 Matt was given an honorary doctorate from UOP. de la Peña currently lives in Southern California. He teaches creative writing and visits schools and colleges throughout the country.
David J. Dennis Jr. is a senior writer at The Undefeated. His work has been featured in Atlanta magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Huffington Post, among other publications. Dennis is the recipient of the 2021 American Mosaic Journalism Prize, is a National Association of Black Journalist Salute to Excellence Award winner, and was named one of The Root's 100 Most Influential African Americans of 2020. He lives in Georgia with his wife and two children, and is a graduate of Davidson College.
David J. Dennis, Sr. is a civil rights veteran and one of the original Freedom Riders who rode from Montgomery to Jackson in 1961. He served as field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality and co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations and helped organize the Freedom Summer in 1964. He attended Dillard University and earned his law degree at the University of Michigan. In 1972, he became an organizer challenging the Louisiana Democratic structure that resulted in an African American chairman and a majority African American delegation being sent to the national convention, the first time since Reconstruction.
Ryan N. Dennis is the chief curator and artistic director of the Center for Art & Public Exchange (CAPE) at the Mississippi Museum of Art.
Ryan previously served as the Curator and Programs Director at Project Row Houses where her work focused on African American contemporary art with a particular emphasis on socially engaged practices, site-specific projects, public interventions and the development of public-facing programs for adults and youth. She is deeply interested in the intersection of art and social justice while creating equitable opportunities for artists to thrive in their work.
Daniel de Visé is the author of the critically acclaimed Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show and The Comeback: Greg LeMond, The True King of American Cycling, and a Legendary Tour de France, and coauthor of I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia. He shared a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his journalism and has worked at the Washington Post and Miami Herald, among other newspapers. He lives in Maryland.
James Dickson teaches English and Creative Writing at Germantown High School, just outside of Jackson, MS. An MFA graduate from the Bennington Writing Seminars, he is the recipient of Mississippi Arts Commission fellowships, was named High School Literary Magazine Advisor of the Year by the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association, and was invited to speak at the National Educators Association 50th anniversary celebration "The Promise of Public Education." His poems, book reviews, and essays appear in The Common, Ruminate, Hospital Drive, The Louisiana Review, Spillway, Slant, Poetry Quarterly, McSweeney's, Sylvia, and other publications. He lives in Jackson with his wife, their son, and a small menagerie of animals.
Alda P. Dobbs is the author of the historical novels Barefoot Dreams of Petra Luna and its followup, The Other Side of the River (September 2022). Her debut novel received a Pura Belpre Honor and is a Texas Bluebonnet Master List selection. Alda was born in a small town in northern Mexico but moved to San Antonio, Texas as a child. She studied physics and worked as an engineer before pursuing her love of storytelling. She's as passionate about connecting children to their past, their communities, different cultures and nature as she is about writing. Alda lives with her husband and two children outside Houston, Texas.
Eric Jay Dolin is the author of fourteen books. His most recent is A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes, which received a number of accolades, including being chosen by the Washington Post as one of 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2020, by Kirkus Reviews as one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2020 (in addition to being a Kirkus Prize finalist), by the Library Journal and Booklist as one of the Best Science & Technology Books of 2020, and by the New York Times Book Review as an "Editor's Choice." Other books include Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, which was chosen as one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2007 by the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, and also won the 2007 John Lyman Award for U.S. Maritime History; and Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates, which was chosen as a "Must-Read" book for 2019 by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and was a finalist for the 2019 Julia Ward Howe Award given by the Boston Author's Club. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in environmental policy, Dolin lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his family.
Todd Doughty is currently SVP, Publicity and Communications, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and has worked at Penguin Random House for more than two decades. A graduate of Southern Illinois University (Carbondale) and former bookseller, he lives with his partner in Westchester County, New York.
David M. Drucker is the author of In Trump's Shadow; The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP (October 2021; Twelve Books) and a senior correspondent for the Washington Examiner, where he focuses on Congress, campaigns and national political trends. Prior to joining the Washington Examiner, he was a reporter for Roll Call, a newspaper in Washington, D.C. Before joining Roll Call, Drucker covered California politics, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, from the Sacramento bureau of the Los Angeles Daily News. Drucker graduated from UCLA with a BA in history and spent eight years managing a family-run manufacturing business in Southern California, giving him a unique perspective on how what happens inside the Beltway affects the rest of the country. Drucker is a Vanity Fair contributing writer and regular on cable news and nationally syndicated radio programs. A native of Los Angeles, Drucker lives on Capitol Hill with his wife and two sons.
Saddiq Dzukogi's poetry collection Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) was named one of the 29 best poetry collections by Oprah Daily. His chapbook Inside the Flower Room was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the APBF New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cincinnati Review, Poetry London, Guernica, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Society of America, Poetry Wales, and other literary journals and magazines. He was a finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships and grants from the Nebraska Arts Council, Pen America, the Obsidian Foundation, Ebedi International Writers' Residency, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Jennifer Egan’s 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, has been awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She is also the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel which became a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, The Keep, and A Visit From the Goon Squad, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize. Her latest novel is, The Candy House, a sibling to A Visit From the Goon Squad.
Egan’s short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney’s and other magazines. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and “The Bipolar Kid” received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She recently completed a term as President of PEN America.
Helen Ellis is the author of Southern Lady Code, American Housewife and Eating the Cheshire Cat. Raised in Alabama, she lives with her husband in New York City. You can find her on Twitter @WhatIDoAllDay and Instagram @American Housewife.
Photo by Lara Magzan Photography
W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through A Real and Imagined Literary Landscape (Timber Press, March 2021). A native of Mount Olive, Mississippi, he is the author of two other books: Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past and The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South. His essays have been published in the Hedgehog Review, Vanity Fair, The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, and The New Yorker. A 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, he is currently a visiting professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. He divides his time between Oxford, Mississippi, and Washington, DC.
David Wright Faladé is a professor of English at the University of Illinois and the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is the co-author of the young adult novel Away Running and the nonfiction book Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers, which was a New Yorker notable selection and a St. Louis-Dispatch Best Book of 2001. The recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award, he has written for the New Yorker, the Village Voice, the Southern Review, Newsday, and more.
Jennifer Fawcett grew up in rural Eastern Ontario and spent many years in Canada making theatre before coming to the United States. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Her work has been published in Third Coast Magazine, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Storybrink, and in the anthology Long Story Short. She teaches writing at Skidmore College and lives in upstate New York with her husband and son.
Andrew Feiler is a fifth generation Georgian. Having grown up Jewish in Savannah, he has been shaped by the rich complexities of the American South. Andrew has long been active in civic life. He has helped create over a dozen community initiatives, serves on multiple not-for-profit boards, and is an active advisor to numerous elected officials and political candidates. His art is an extension of his civic values.
Feiler's photographs have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, Architect, Preservation, Eye on Photography, The Forward as well as on CBS This Morning and NPR. His work has been displayed in galleries and museums including solo exhibitions at such venues as the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, and International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro, NC. His work is in a number of public and private collections including that of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture. More of his work can be seen at andrewfeiler.com.
Beth Ann Fennelly, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, is the former poet laureate of Mississippi and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She’s won grants and awards from the N.E.A., the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three books of poetry and three of prose, most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, which was a Goodreaders Favorite and an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book. She lives with her husband, Tom Franklin, and their three children In Oxford, MS. www.bethannfennelly.com
Marcie Cohen Ferris, author of The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region and Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South, is professor emerita of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
William Ferris is the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1997-2001), Ferris has written or edited 16 books and created 15 documentary films. He co-edited with Charles Wilson the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His books include: Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues, The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists, and The South in Color: A Visual Journal. His most recent publication Voices of Mississippi received two Grammy Awards for Best Liner Notes and for Best Historical Album. Ferris curated “I Am a Man:” Civil Rights Photographs in the American South-1960-1970, which is on exhibit at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and is accompanied by his latest book “I Am a Man”: Civil Rights Photographs in the American South-1960-1970.
His honors include the Charles Frankel Prize in the Humanities, the American Library Association’s Dartmouth Medal, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and the W.C. Handy Blues Award. In 1991, Rolling Stone magazine named him among the Top Ten Professors in the United States. He is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. Ferris received the B. L. C. Wailes Award, given to a Mississippian who has achieved national recognition in the field of history by the Mississippi Historical Society. In 2017, Ferris received the Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Tim Fielder is an Illustrator, concept designer, cartoonist, and animator born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and raised in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He has a lifelong love of Visual Afrofuturism, Pulp entertainment, and action films. He is known for his graphic novel series, Matty's Rocket, and his TEDx Talk on Afrofuturism. His most recent work is the critically acclaimed graphic novel, Infinitum: An Afrofuturist Tale, published by HarperCollins Amistad.
Josh Foreman is from Jackson, Mississippi. His second home is Seoul, South Korea, where he lived, taught, and traveled from 2005 to 2014. He holds degrees from Mississippi State University and the University of New Hampshire. He lives in Starkville, Mississippi, with his wife, Melissa, and his three children, Keeland, Genevieve, and Ulrich. He teaches journalism at Mississippi State University.
Ke Francis is a narrative artist who has been actively producing artwork for more than forty years. He and his wife Mary are the co-owners of HOOPSNAKE PRESS, a fine art press that publishes artist books and prints.
His book works, paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures are in over thirty major public and private international collections including: The Getty Museum, National Gallery, National Museum of American Art, High Museum, New Orleans Museum of Fine Art, San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, Yale / Sterling Memorial Library, Van-Pelt Dietrich Collection, The Polaroid Collection, and the Ginsburg Collection in Johannesburg, South Africa among many others.
He has had more than fifty one-person and two-person exhibits. Most recently, Mr. Francis had a one-person exhibit of sixty-one works at Terrace Gallery, Orlando City Hall that ran until Jan.6, 2012, a one-person exhibit of fifty books and prints at the Ringling College of Art and Design during November of 2011 and a one person exhibit at the Orlando Museum of fine Art in January of 2011.
Tom Franklin is the New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award. His previous works include Poachers, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk. He teaches in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
X.M. "Mike" Frascogna Jr. has nearly fifty years experience as a practicing attorney, negotiator, and professor. His experience ranges from multi-national litigation and FBI hostage negotiation, to deep experience in the fields of entertainment and sports. He is a prolific writer and has published a number of books on both professional and popular topics.
Olivia Clare Friedman is the author of the story collection Disasters in the First World, the poetry collection The 26-Hour Day, and the novel Here Lies. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories, Granta, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, among other publications. Raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she teaches Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she holds the title of Nina Bell Suggs Endowed Professor.
Susan Garrard has been President and CEO of the Mississippi Children's Museum since 2008 and was responsible for successfully completing and administering a $26.6 million capital campaign that realized the dream of an award-winning children's museum in Jackson, Mississippi. Under her leadership, the museum has received many accolades including the Institute of Museum and Library Services National Medal 2021, the nation's highest honor for museums. The Mississippi Children's Museum opened its first satellite location in Meridian, MS in early 2021 and was awarded the 2021 MS Travel Attraction of the Year.
Susan serves in professional leadership as a member of the boards of Visit Jackson, Mississippi Tourism Association, and the Nissan advisory board. She was appointed to the Mississippi Volunteer Commission in 2022. She has served on the Association of Children's Museums (ACM) board of directors and executive committee. In 2017, Susan was named one of the 50 Leading Business Women of the Year by the Mississippi Business Journal.
Susan, a native of Sebastopol, MS, is a graduate of Mississippi State University and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. She is married to John Walter Garrard II and the mother of two sons, Jack, and William.
Winner of the 1984 National Book Award for Fiction for her collection of short stories, Victory Over Japan, Ellen Gilchrist has been declared “a national treasure” by the Washington Post for her various works, which at present constitute a collection of twenty-three books. She has received numerous other awards for her work, as well as a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Fiction. A Mississippi native, she currently lives in Fayetteville (Washington County) and was for many years a faculty member at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville.
Melissa Ginsburg is author of the poetry collections Doll Apollo and Dear Weather Ghost, the novels The House Uptown and Sunset City, and three poetry chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Guernica, Image, West Branch, and many other magazines. She teaches creative writing at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and serves as associate editor of Tupelo Quarterly.
Kathleen Glasgow is the New York Times bestselling author of books for young adults, including Girl in Pieces, You'd Be Home Now, and How to Make Friends With the Dark. Her latest book is The Agathas, a young adult mystery cowritten with Liz Lawson. She lives in Arizona.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. He is the former president of the American Academy of Religion, the largest professional organization of scholars of religion in the world. Glaude is the author of several important books including Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, which has been described as "one of the most imaginative, daring books of the twenty-first century." His most recent book, Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, was released on June 30, 2020. Imani Perry describes the book as "precisely the witness we need for our treacherous times. He is a columnist for Time Magazine and an MSNBC contributor on programs like Morning Joe, and Deadline Whitehouse with Nicolle Wallace. He also regularly appears on Meet the Press on Sundays.
He hails from Moss Point, Mississippi, a small town on the Gulf Coast, and is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Chris Goodwin is host of the Speaking of Mississippi podcast and the History Is Lunch lecture series for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
Aram Goudsouzian is the Bizot Family Professor of History at the University of Memphis, where he teaches courses on modern American history, with a particular focus on race, politics, and culture. He is the author of five books, including biographies of the actor Sidney Poitier and the basketball player Bill Russell, and the co-editor with Charles McKinney of An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee. His book Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear won the McLemore Book Prize from the Mississippi Historical Society.
Torrin A. Greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. Her work is published in POETRY, the New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. She was a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. Her debut collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), was the winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies and Matrix, and the short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won the Story Prize and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Groff’s work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists.
Jeff Guinn is the bestselling author of numerous books, including Go Down Together, The Last Gunfight, Manson, and The Road to Jonestown. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas, and is a member of the Texas Literary Hall of Fame.
Becky Hagenston is the author of four award-winning story collections: The Age of Discovery and Other Stories, Scavengers, Strange Weather, and A Gram of Mars. Her work has been chosen for a Pushcart Prize and twice for an O. Henry Award. She is a professor of English at Mississippi State University and lives in Starkville, Mississippi.
(Photo by Megan Bean/Mississippi State University)
Matt Haines tried to eat as many different versions of king cake that he could during the 2017 Mardi Gras season, and ended up sampling over 80 different varieties. That was just before he hiked the entire Appalachian trail. When he returned to New Orleans from this amazing feat he began his writing career. Since then Matt has written for Voice of America, Lonely Planet, CNN Underscored, Zagat, Fodor's Travel, Rosetta Stone, Great Big Story, AlltimePower, The Times-Picayune, The New Orleans Advocate, Gambit Weekly, Very Local New Orleans and GoNOLA.com, as well as technology companies like Align and nonprofit organizations such as 504ward. Matt loves writing about food, travel and just about anything that helps him better understand people and their unique motivations. He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Shaun Hamill received his BA in English from the University of Texas at Arlington and his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first novel, A Cosmology of Monsters, was released in 2019 and was a finalist for "Best Horror Novel" in the Goodreads Choice Awards. His second novel, The Dissonance, is forthcoming from Pantheon Books. He lives and works in Arlington, Texas.
Clara Hammett holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is from Jackson, Mississippi and is a former bookseller at Lemuria Books. She is a reporter and writes for Cynsations, a website that celebrates children's literature started by author Cynthia Leitich Smith. Clara has also reviewed children's books for The Clarion Ledger newspaper and owned former children's book review website Twenty by Jenny. She likes creating all forms of art and going for walks with her family. While she has held many jobs, her most recent one is that of mom. Her current reading stack ranges from Jane Austen to Jesmyn Ward and a lot of Sandra Boynton!
Mississippi native Gwen Harmon is a Jackson State University alumnae, spent 15 years as the Director of Marketing and Governmental Affairs with the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis; in management positions with United Airlines (Chicago, IL) Federal Express (Memphis, TN) and the US Department of Commerce (Washington DC) and recently with Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. She joined the Smith Robertson Museum and Cultural Center in 2021.
First elected to Congress in 2009, Gregg served five terms representing Mississippi’s 3rd Congressional District. During his time in Congress, he served as a member of the influential House Committee on Energy and Commerce which has jurisdiction over a broad swath of the economy including healthcare, energy, transportation, and telecommunications. On the Energy and Commerce Committee, Gregg served as Chairman of the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee and Vice Chairman of the Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection subcommittee. In addition, Gregg was selected by Speaker Paul Ryan to serve as the Chairman of the Committee on House Administration for the 115th Congress where he was instrumental in reforming the ways that Congress handles sexual harassment allegations. He was also the Chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress and served two terms on the Committee on Ethics.
Prior to being elected to Congress, Gregg practiced law for twenty-seven years, including serving as the prosecuting attorney for the cities of Brandon and Richland, Mississippi. He served on the Mississippi Oil and Gas Board, remained active in his community as a member of both the Pearl and Rankin County Chambers of Commerce, and served as the board attorney for the Mississippi Baptist Children’s Village.
Steve Hayes is the CEO, co-founder, and editor of The Dispatch podcast. He is also the author of two New York Times best sellers and an NBC News Political Analyst.
Sarah Heying is a PhD candidate in English and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi, where they research lesbian and trans literature that invokes the site of the U.S. South to negotiate the intersections between gender, sexuality, race, and legacies of dispossession. Their short story, "The Chair Kickers' Tale," won the 2019 Robert Watson Fiction Award from The Greensboro Review, and their writing has also appeared in West Branch, Lit Hub, Bitch, Autostraddle, and elsewhere.
Ladee Hubbard is the author of The Rib King and The Talented Ribkins, which received the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, the Times Literary Supplement, Copper Nickel, and Callaloo. She is a recipient of the Berlin Prize and was recently named a Harvard Radcliffe Fellow. She is also won a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Art Omi, the Sacatar Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Born in Massachusetts and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Florida, Hubbard currently lives in New Orleans with her husband and three children.
Berkley Hudson is emeritus associate professor of media history at the Missouri School of Journalism of the University of Missouri. For twenty-five years, including at the Los Angeles Times, he worked as a journalist. The National Endowment for Humanities awarded Hudson two grants for a traveling exhibit of O.N. Pruitt's photographs which Hudson curated from among 88,000 negatives. Hudson was born in Columbus, Mississippi, and in the 1950s was among the many subjects captured by Pruitt's expansive photo-eye. In 1987, Hudson and four boyhood friends preserved the Pruitt collection with its remarkable images of Mississippi trouble and resilience. In 2022, UNC Press in partnership with Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies published the exhibit's companion book Hudson authored. He earned degrees from the University of Mississippi, Columbia University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Chapel Hill, NC, with his wife, storyteller and writer Milbre Burch.
Laird Hunt is the author of eight novels, a collection of stories, and two book-length translations from the French. His most recent novel, Zorrie, was a 2021 finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, and Italy’s Bridge prize. His reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many others. He teaches in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University and lives in Providence.
Linda Williams Jackson is the author of Midnight Without a Moon, which was an American Library Association Notable Children's Book, a Jane Addams Honor Book for Peace and Social Justice, and a Washington Post Summer Book Club Selection. Her second book, A Sky Full of Stars, received a Malka Penn Honor for an outstanding children's book addressing human rights issues and was a Bank Street College Best Book of the Year. Her third book, The Lucky Ones, was inspired by Robert Kennedy's 1967 Poverty Tour of the Mississippi Delta and is loosely based on her own family's experiences in the Delta. Born and raised in Rosedale, Mississippi, Linda Williams Jackson lives in Southaven, Mississippi, with her family.
Tiffany D. Jackson is the NYT Bestselling author of YA novels including the Coretta Scott King - John Steptoe New Talent Award-winning Monday’s Not Coming, the NAACP Image Award-nominated Allegedly, Let Me Hear A Rhyme, Grown, and her forthcoming 2021 titles Blackout, White Smoke, and Santa in the City. She received her bachelor of arts in film from Howard University, her master of arts in media studies from the New School, and has over a decade in TV/Film experience. The Brooklyn native is a lover of naps, cookie dough, and beaches, currently residing in the borough she loves, most likely multitasking.
Morgan Jerkins is the author of Wandering in Strange Lands and the New York Times bestseller This Will Be My Undoing and a Senior Culture Editor at ESPN's The Undefeated. Jerkins is a visiting professor at Columbia University and a Forbes 30 Under 30 leader in media, and her short-form work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Elle, Esquire, and the Guardian, among many other outlets. She is based in Harlem.
Sadeqa Johnson is the award-winning author of four novels. Her accolades include the National Book Club Award, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the USA Best Book Award for Best Fiction. She is a Kimbilio Fellow, former board member of the James River Writers, and a Tall Poppy Writer. Originally from Philadelphia, she currently lives near Richmond, Virginia, with her husband and three children. To learn more, visit SadeqaJohnson.net.
Chris Joyner is an investigative reporter with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution with more than two decades of experience in journalism, ranging from community newspapers to national and international news and wire services. He reported from the scene of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. As an investigative reporter, he focuses on uncovering hidden communities and has written about street gangs and life inside a supermax prison, the hidden world of government lobbying, and a white-collar criminal network built around a drug testing lab. He lives in Atlanta.
Motivational speaker, historian, and women's activist, Pamela D.C. Junior is a native of Jackson, Mississippi and earned a B.S. in Education with a minor in Special Education from Jackson State University. Pamela is the newly appointed director of the Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson, Mississippi. As former manager of Smith Robertson Museum and Cultural Center, Pamela fought passionately and tirelessly to make the museum a first-class place of interpretation, bringing the museum from financial struggles to features across the nation, most notably, one of CNN's "50 States, 50 Spots." After seventeen years of service at Smith Robertson Museum, Pamela became the inaugural director of the first state-sponsored civil rights museum in the nation, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, where she welcomed more than 250,000 visitors in her first year. Today, she is at the helm of the Two Mississippi Museums where she continuesher tireless work to share the stories of Mississippi with audiences all over the world.
Harrison Scott Key is the author of two books: Congratulations, Who Are You Again? and The World's Largest Man, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor. He has spoken at TEDx and hundreds of book festivals, conferences, and universities around the nation. Harrison's humor and nonfiction have appeared in The Best American Travel Writing, Garden & Gun, Oxford American, Outside, The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, Town & Country, Salon, Reader's Digest, Image, Southern Living, Gulf Coast, Creative Nonfiction, and more. He holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction and a Ph.D. in playwriting and works at SCAD, where he has held appointments as professor, chair, and dean.
Juhea Kim is a writer, artist, and advocate based in Portland, Oregon. Her bestselling debut novel Beasts of a Little Land was named a Best Book of 2021 by Harper's Bazaar, Real Simple, Ms., and Portland Monthly. It will be published around the world in 2022. Her writing has been published in Granta, Slice, The Massachusetts Review, Zyzzyva, Guernica, Catapult, Joyland, Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, Sierra Magazine, Portland Monthly, LitHub, and elsewhere. She is the founder and editor of Peaceful Dumpling, an online magazine at the intersection of sustainable lifestyle and ecological literature. She has received fellowship support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She earned her BA in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University. Find out more at juheakim.com and Instagram @juhea_writes.
James Kirchick has written about human rights, politics, and culture from around the world. A columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, he is the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. Kirchick's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. A graduate of Yale with degrees in history and political science, he resides in Washington, DC.
Alan Lange is the Publisher of Y'all Politics, Mississippi's most recognized political news organization. In 2009, he co-authored Kings of Tort which was published by Pediment Publishing and documented the largest judicial bribery scandal in Mississippi history involving tort barons Dickie Scruggs and Paul Minor.
Holly Lange is a founder and the former Executive Director of the Mississippi Book Festival. Reading Victory over Japan launched Holly's love for Ellen Gilchrist and the festival has given them a friendship for the ages.
Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Kiese Laymon, Ottilie Schillig Professor in English and Creative Writing and the University of Mississippi, is the author of the novel Long Division, the memoir Heavy, and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America.
William Lester was born in Collierville, TN in 1948. After graduating from Murrah High Schoolin Jackson, MS, he attended the University of Mississippi and graduated with a BS in business and an MFA in Sculpture. His teaching career was at Delta State University where he taught in the Art Department for thirty-eight years and retired as Professor Emeritus. Currently he is Executive Director of the Dockery Farms Foundation, the birthplace of the blues.
Beverly Lowry is the author of six novels and four previous works of nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Mississippi Review, Granta, and many other publications. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Robby Luckett received his BA in political science from Yale University and his PhD in history from the University of Georgia. A native Mississippian, he returned home, where he is a tenured Professor of History and Director of the Margaret Walker Center and COFO Civil Rights Education Center at Jackson State University. His books include a collection of essays, Redefining Liberal Arts Education in the 21st Century (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), and a monograph, Joe T. Patterson and the White South’s Dilemma: Evolving Resistance to Black Advancement, (University Press of Mississippi, 2015).
Robby is an Advisory Board member for the Mississippi Book Festival, and he serves as Vice President of the Board of Directors of Common Cause Mississippi and as Secretary of the Board for the Association of African American Museums. In 2017, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba appointed him to the Board of Trustees of Jackson Public Schools, and, in 2018, he received a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network Fellowship for his work in racial equity. Robby has three children: Silas, Hazel, and Flip.
Ebony Lumumba is an associate professor of English at Jackson State University and serves as department chair. She received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Mississippi a Master of Arts in English from Georgia State University and graduated Magna Cum Laude from Spelman College with a Bachelor of Arts in English. She was named the 2013 Eudora Welty Research Fellow by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and the Eudora Welty Foundation and was honored as Tougaloo College’s Humanities Teacher of the Year in 2014. She specializes in postcolonial literatures of the Global South and black mothering as resistance in her research academic publications and instruction. Dr. Lumumba is an active scholar with publications that include a chapter in From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help: Critical Perspectives on White-Authored Texts of Black Life; an article in the Eudora Welty Review titled “‘Caught in the act of living’”: Welty as a voyeur and witness of black life”; a chapter titled “The Matter of Black Lives in American Literature: Eudora Welty’s Non-Fiction and Photography” and a chapter in the forthcoming collection New Essays on Welty Class and Race.
Jenn Lyons was a graphic artist and illustrator for 20 years before working as a video game producer on projects ranging from indie projects and slot-machine games to AAA titles for EA. In 2020, she was nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Her five-book Chorus of Dragons fantasy series began with The Ruin of Kings. The most recent is the final book in the series, The Discord of Gods. Visit her online at www.jennlyons.com or follow her on Twitter @jennlyonsauthor.
Julie Hines Mabus is a fifth-generation Mississippian, educated at the University of Mississippi, majoring in mathematics, and at Columbia University with an MBA in finance. She practiced as a CPA over the years in Jackson and San Francisco. She is the mother of two beautiful and accomplished daughters and stepmother to some fifty of the Lost Boys of Sudan-African refugees who resettled in Mississippi in 2000.
She has been single since 2000 but spent time promoting adult literacy and childcare while the spouse of the governor of Mississippi during the 1988 until 1992. She also promoted women's issues while he was ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. Julie recently moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where she tutors college-level students in accounting and finance.
This book happened serendipitously, but after many years of working in myriad industries and professions, she has come to realize writing empowers her and makes her whole. The serendipity occurred when her close friend told her a harrowing story from her childhood. Julie's only response was "I have to write about it. Someone has to write about it. Your story must be told." And so she began.
David Magee is the bestselling author of Dear William: A Father's Memoir of Addiction, Recovery, Love and Loss, a Publisher's Weekly national bestseller, and other books including How Toyota Became #1 (Penguin), a bestseller in India, and an award-winning columnist, and TEDx speaker. David has been a daily newspaper publisher, small business owner, a regular guest on CNBC, and once hosted a national cable TV program, The David Magee Show. He is currently the Director of Institute Advancement at the University of Mississippi-the role he started after helping create and launch The William Magee Center for AOD and Wellness Education at the university, named for his late son who died of a drug overdose.
Bethany Mangle is the author of Prepped and All the Right Reasons. She was born in Korea and raised in New Jersey in a household full of books, sheet music, and dog hair. She currently lives and writes in Mississippi. Visit her at BethanyMangle.com.
Mesha Maren is the author of the novels Sugar Run and Perpetual West (Algonquin Books). Her short stories and essays can be read in Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, Crazyhorse, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Sou'wester, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She was the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an Assistant Professor of the Practice of English at Duke University and also serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the federal prison camp in Alderson, West Virginia.
Jonathan Martin is a national political correspondent for The New York Times, a political analyst for CNN and the co-author of the New York Times best-seller, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America's Future.
He joined the Times in 2013 after working as a senior political writer for POLITICO. His work has been featured in The New Republic, National Review, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. A native of Arlington, Virginia, Martin is a graduate of Hampden-Sydney College. He and his wife, Betsy, live in Washington and New Orleans.
Kevin Maurer is an award-winning journalist and three-time New York Times bestselling co-author of No Easy Day, No Hero and American Radical among others. For the last eleven years, Maurer has also worked as a freelance writer covering war, politics and general interest stories. His writing has been published in GQ, Men's Journal, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, and numerous other publications.
Angela May is the founder of May Media and PR and a former award-winning television news journalist who helps promote great books and share important community stories as a media specialist. She has been working with Mary Alice Monroe for more than a decade. The Islanders series are their first books together! Angela’s husband is a middle school assistant principal. They have two children and live in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Connect with her at AngelaMayBooks.com.
Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters and Professor of History at Millsaps College. He is the author of eight books, including Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the 'Forgotten Man', The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941, Mario Cuomo: A Biography, Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History, and Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America. His latest book, The Times They Were a-Changin' - 1964: The Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn, was published in June 2022. Two of his books were named "Notable Books of the Year" by the New York Times Book Review.
In 2010, McElvaine won the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence. His articles and opinion pieces appear frequently in such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Politico, The Nation, and Newsweek. He has been a guest on more than 100 television and radio programs.
McElvaine has lectured across the United States and in England, Russia, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, South Africa, Papua New Guinea, and India.
C. Liegh McInnis is a poet, short story writer, and retired English instructor at Jackson State University, the former editor/publisher of Black Magnolias Literary Journal, the author of eight books, including four collections of poetry, one collection of short fiction (Scripts: Sketches and Tales of Urban Mississippi), one work of literary criticism (The Lyrics of Prince: A Literary Look at a Creative, Musical Poet, Philosopher, and Storyteller), one co-authored work, Brother Hollis: The Sankofa of a Movement Man, which discusses the life of a legendary Mississippi Civil Rights icon, and the former First Runner-Up of the Amiri Baraka/Sonia Sanchez Poetry Award. His work has appeared in Obsidian, Tribes, The Southern Quarterly, Konch Magazine, Bum Rush the Page, Down to the Dark River: Anthology of Poems about the Mississippi River, Black Hollywood Unchained: Essays about Hollywood's Portrayal of African Americans, Black Gold: Anthology of Black Poetry, Sable, New Delta Review, Black World Today, In Motion Magazine, MultiCultural Review, A Deeper Shade, New Laurel Review, ChickenBones, Oxford American, Journal of Ethnic American Literature, and Red Ochre Lit.
Chris McLaughlin is founder and executive director of the Animal Rescue Front. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts Boston with a BA in earth sciences, she lives in Massachusetts with two cats. This is her first book.
Dr. Leslie-Burl McLemore is a Mississippi activist who sparked a boycott of his high school in 1960, demanding that the school library include books about black history. He has played a variety of roles as an activist serving the people of Mississippi and the nation in many capacities. Over the course of his life, he has been a field secretary for SNCC, vice chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's original delegation to the 1964 Democratic Convention, a member of Jackson's city council, an interim mayor of Jackson, and a political science professor at Jackson State University.
Margaret McMullan is the author of nine award-winning books including the novel, In My Mother’s House, the story collection Aftermath Lounge, and the anthology, Every Father’s Daughter. Her young adult novels How I Found the Strong, When I Crossed No-Bob, and Sources of Light have received best book awards from Parents’ Choice, School Library Journal, the American Library Association, and Booklist, among other educational organizations. Margaret received an NEA Fellowship and a Fulbright professorship in Hungary to research her memoir Where the Angels Lived.
Margaret’s work has appeared in USA Today, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Herald, Glamour, The Millions, The Morning Consult, Teachers & Writers Magazine, The Montréal Review, National Geographic for Kids, Southern Accents, Ploughshares, StorySouth, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, Other Voices, Boulevard, The Arkansas Review, Southern California Anthology, and The Sun, among others. She has served as a faculty mentor at the Stony Brook Southampton Low-res MFA Program in New York and she was the Melvin Peterson Endowed Chair in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Evansville, where she taught for 25 years. She writes full time now in Pass Christian, Mississippi.
Candice Millard is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic. Her book Hero of the Empire was named Amazon's number one history book of 2016. She lives in Kansas City with her husband and three children.
Mary Miller is the author of two short story collections and two novels, most recently Biloxi: A Novel (Liveright 2019). Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, the Oxford American, Pushcart Prize XLIV, and many others. She is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and a former Grisham writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi (2014-15).
The stories of Clarion-Ledger investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell have helped put four Klansmen and a suspected serial killer behind bars. His stories have also exposed injustices and corruption in Mississippi, helping lead to investigations, exonerations, firings and reforms of state agencies. A winner of a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grant and more than 30 other national awards, including being named a Pulitzer Prize finalist, he is finishing his memoir about his pursuit of civil rights cold cases, Race Against Time, for Simon & Schuster.
David Rae Morris was born in Oxford, England and grew up in New York City. He holds a B.A. from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, in 1982, and an M.A. In Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of Minnesota in 1991. His photographs and films have been published, exhibited and shown widely. His forthcoming book Love, Daddy: Letters From My Father, which was exhibited at the Ogden Museum in 2007, was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2022. He and his long time partner, Susanne Dietzel, live in New Orleans with two cats.
Michael Morris is the director of public engagement at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, where he has worked since 2016. Previously, Morris worked at the Fannie Lou Hamer Institute on Citizenship and Democracy and the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University (JSU). He earned his BA in history and his MA in political science from JSU. Morris is a life-long resident of Jackson, Mississippi.
An award-winning journalist, Marissa R. Moss has written about the topic of gender inequality on the country airwaves for outlets like Rolling Stone, NPR, Billboard, Entertainment Weekly, and many more. Moss was the 2018 recipient of the Rolling Stone Chet Flippo Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism, and the 2019 Nashville Scene Best of Nashville Best Music Reporter. She has been a guest on The TODAY Show, Entertainment Tonight, CBS Morning Show, NPR's Weekend Edition, WPLN, the Pop Literacy Podcast, and more.
Erin Napier is an artist, author, designer and entrepreneur with a fine arts degree who started her career in corporate graphic design before founding her own international stationery company, Lucky Luxe, and is a founding co-owner of Laurel Mercantile Co.
Six days after meeting in college, Erin and Ben decided they would marry and have been inseparable ever since, working side by side in every venture. Their passion for small-town revitalization and American craftsmanship is evident in their store, Laurel Mercantile Co., where they design and manufacture heirloom wares and durable goods made exclusively in the United States. They live in Laurel, Mississippi with their two daughters where they restore homes on HGTV's Home Town.
Brittney Newell is originally from Lucedale, MS but now lives in Meridian, MS with her husband, Dalton, and their three children, Elliot, Kipton, and Hollis. She graduated in 2013 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Elementary Education from The University of Southern Mississippi. Brittney has been teaching for 8 years and is currently a second grade teacher at Northeast Lauderdale Elementary School. This past year she served as an educator for the LIFT program through the Mississippi Children's Museum and the Barksdale Reading Institute. She and her family are active members of Northcrest Baptist Church. In her spare time she enjoys going on walks with her family, cooking with her husband, and reading a good novel.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the New York Times best-selling author of World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction, and recently named the Barnes and Noble Book of the Year. She is also the author of four books of poetry, and is poetry editor of Sierra, the national magazine of the Sierra Club. Awards for her writing include a fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Council, Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for poetry, National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her writing has appeared in NYTimes Magazine, ESPN Magazine, and twice in Best American Poetry. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.
Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, and the chapbook, "American Lục Bát for My Mother" (Bull City Press, 2021). He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in Wildness, The Texas Review, Auburn Avenue, and elsewhere. He has also been featured on both the "VS" podcast and "The Slowdown". He is the Wit Tea co-editor for The Offing Mag, the Kundiman South co-chair, a bubble tea connoisseur, and loves a good pun. He is a PhD student at The University of Mississippi, where he also received his MFA.
Carmen Oliver is the author of many award-winning picture books for children including A Voice for the Spirit Bears: How One Boy Inspired Millions to Save a Rare Animal, a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, Building an Orchestra of Hope: How Favio Chavez Taught Children to Make Music From Trash, a Junior Library Gold Standard Selection (Oct 25, 2022), and The Twilight Library (Sept 6, 2022). She's also the author of the Bears Make the Best Buddies series (Reading, Writing, Math, Science).
In 2014, Carmen founded the Booking Biz, a boutique style agency that brings award-winning children's authors and illustrators to schools, libraries, and special events. She also teaches writing at the Writing Barn and The Highlights Foundation and loves speaking at schools, conferences and festivals. She lives with her family outside of Austin, Texas.
To connect or learn more about Carmen and her books, visit www.carmenoliver.com.
January Gill O'Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University, and the author of Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and currently serves on the boards of AWP and Montserrat College of Art. Her poems and articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, Poetry, and Sierra magazine, among others. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O'Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She lives with her two children in Beverly, MA.
Casey Parks is a reporter for The Washington Post who covers gender and family issues. She was previously a staff reporter at the Jackson (Miss.) Free Press and spent a decade at The Oregonian, where she wrote about race and LGBTQ+ issues and was a finalist for the Livingston Award. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Oxford American, ESPN, USA Today, and The Nation. A former Spencer Fellow at Columbia University, Parks was most recently awarded the 2021 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for her work on Diary of a Misfit. Parks lives in Portland.
Dr. Ruth W. Patterson is a pediatrician in Jackson, Mississippi and is affiliated with University of Mississippi Medical Center. She received her medical degree from Howard University College of Medicine and has been in practice for more than 20 years.
Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Perry is the author of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, winner of the 2019 Bograd-Weld Biography Prize from the Pen America Foundation. She is also the author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation; and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. Perry, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago, lives outside Philadelphia with her two sons.
Mary Laura Philpott, author of the national bestseller I Miss You When I Blink, writes essays that examine the overlap of the absurd and the profound in everyday life. Her writing has been featured frequently by The New York Times and appears in such outlets as The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Real Simple, and more. A former bookseller, she also hosted an interview program on Nashville Public Television for several years. Mary Laura lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her family.
Catherine Pierce is the author of four books of poems: Danger Days (2020), The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words (2008), winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Each of her last three books received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize winner and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mississippi Arts Commission. Pierce’s work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Southern Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. She is professor of English and co-director of the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.
Ty Pinkins is truly a "son of the Mississippi Delta." Born and raised in the small town of Rolling Fork, he is a former Communications Aide to President Barack Obama, and the author of 23 Miles & Running: My American Journey from Chopping Cotton in the Mississippi Delta to Sleeping in the White House. A decorated veteran of the U.S. Army he spent three years in combat, earning the Bronze Star for his actions. Ty is a dedicated public servant. Upon retiring after 21 years in the military, he co-founded The Pyramid Project, a nonprofit organization serving youth from low-income communities by providing career and academic related resources and mentorship opportunities. Ty is a lawyer at the Mississippi Center for Justice where he advocates on behalf of individuals in some of Mississippi's most underserved communities by helping litigants navigate the justice court system. He earned his J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center as well as his LL.M (Master of Laws in National Security Law) from Georgetown Law.
Nate Powell is the first cartoonist ever to win the National Book Award. His work includes the new graphic memoir/essay Save It For Later, Ozark horror tale Come Again, civil rights icon John Lewis' March trilogy and its follow-up Run, Two Dead, Any Empire, Swallow Me Whole, and The Silence Of Our Friends.
Powell's work has also received a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, three Eisner Awards, two Ignatz Awards, four YALSA Great Graphic Novels For Teens selections, and two Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist selections.
He lives in Bloomington, Indiana and is currently making his next solo graphic novel, Fall Through (2023) as well as an adaptation of James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me (2024).
Ben Raines is an award-winning environmental journalist, filmmaker, and charter captain. He lives with his wife in Fairhope, Alabama.
Marshall Ramsey, a nationally recognized editorial cartoonist, shares his cartoons and travels the state as Mississippi Today’s Editor-At-Large. Marshall can often be found in communities across Mississippi, promoting public conversations about the news and inspiring audiences to engage in civic life. He’s also host of a weekly statewide radio program and a television program on Mississippi Public Broadcasting and is the author of several books. Marshall is a graduate of the University of Tennessee with a degree in business administration and marketing. His cartoons have appeared in the Clarion Ledger, where he worked for 22 years, as well as USA Today, CNN, Fox News, The Today Show, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine and 300 newspapers around the United States. He is a two-time Pulitzer Finalist and was named a top 100 employee of Gannett. He has received numerous MPA awards and the John Locher Memorial Award, which is given to nation’s top collegiate cartoonist.
Julian Rankin was raised in Mississippi and North Carolina, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rankin was the founding Director of the Center for Art & Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art, and now serves as Executive Director of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. He is the author of Catfish Dream: Ed Scott's Fight for his Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta, published by the University of Georgia Press as part of the Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place series. For Catfish Dream, Rankin was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award and recognized as the 2019 Nonfiction winner by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.
The Children's Book Council named James E. Ransome as one of seventy-five authors and illustrators everyone should know. An award-winning illustrator of over sixty books, he received the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustrations for his book, The Creation and has received several Coretta Scott Honors for many of his other books as well as being the recipient of The Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance award, the NAACP Image Award for Illustration, and is an ALA Notable Book recipient. His body of work received the Rip Van Winkle Award from the School Library Media Specialists of Southeast New York in 2001. He lives in Rhinebeck, New York with his wife Lesa Cline Ransome, a writer of children's books.
Lauren Rhoades is an essayist, memoirist and the director of grants at the Mississippi Arts Commission. Previously, she was the director of the Eudora Welty House & Garden. She earned an MFA from the Mississippi University for Women.
Lyn Roberts has been a bookseller at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi since 1988. Sometime after that she became the general manager of what is now four stores on five floors in three buildings on Oxford's town square in the center of town. She lives in Taylor with her husband Douglas.
Steve Robertson is a native of Columbia, Mississippi and a resident of Starkville. Robertson has penned five books: Flim Flam, Stark Villains, Alpha Dawgs, Blooms of Oleander and, his latest, Dawg Pile.
Dawg Pile chronicles Mississippi State's 2021 national championship season that ended with a College World Series title in Omaha.
Robertson has covered Mississippi State sports since 1997 and works as the co-publisher of Genespage.com, the Mississippi State affiliate for 247Sports.
In addition to his work in sports journalism, Robertson uses the experience, strength and hope learned in over 30 years of recovery from substance abuse to help still suffering addicts and those who love them.
Stuart Rockoff received his Ph.D. in US history from the University of Texas at Austin with a special emphasis on immigration and American Jewish history. He has taught several history courses in American and ethnic history at such schools as the University of Texas and Millsaps College and has published numerous articles and essays on southern Jewish history. In November, 2013, he became the executive director of the Mississippi Humanities Council, where he works to develop and support public programs that explore our state’s unique history and culture. He was a member of the scholarly review board for both the Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. He also serves on the board of the Mississippi Book Festival.
Ellen Hunter Ruffin, associate professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, has been curator of the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection since 2006. She has served on the Newbery Medal Committee, the Children's Literature Legacy Award, and the Schneider Family Book Award. She also serves as an administrator of the Ezra Jack Keats Award.
C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut collection, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking now available from Acre Books. He’s the author of three chapbooks, most recently American Cavewall Sonnets (Bull City Press, 2021). He’s the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award in poetry. His poems have appeared in The Rumpus, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, 32 Poems, RHINO, and elsewhere.
Sidney L. "Sid" Salter is Chief Communications Officer and Director of the Office of Public Affairs at Mississippi State University. He is also the university's spokesman and the administrator of both the University Television Center and campus radio station WMSV-FM.
He has enjoyed a unique career as an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, television commentator, talk radio host, author, educator, and university administrator.
The Washington Post has listed him as "one of the nation's best state political reporters." He is a member of the Miss. Press Association's Hall of Fame. His op/ed columns have been widely published for more than 40 years.
Salter represents MSU on the board of directors of the University Press of Mississippi - the state's academic press. He wrote the biographies of legendary MSU broadcaster Jack Cristil and U.S. Rep. G.V. "Sonny" Montgomery and contributed essays to three published collections.
Salter is a member of the boards of directors of Community Bancshares of Mississippi, Inc., and the G.V. Montgomery Foundation. He and his wife, Leilani, have four grown children and nine grandchildren.
James M. Scott is the author, most recently, of Rampage and Target Tokyo, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina. http://www.jamesmscott.com/
Jodi Skipper is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. Her research seeks to understand how historic preservation projects might play a role in imagining more sustainable and healthy futures for U.S. southern communities. During her time at the University of Mississippi, she has worked with Behind the Big House, a slave dwelling interpretation program in Mississippi, which expanded to the state of Arkansas. In 2017, Skipper was awarded one of eight Whiting Foundation Public Humanities fellowships to help expand the program model. With that fellowship, she created behindthebighouse.org, a website designed to help make the program model more accessible to individuals and institutions thinking through how they might incorporate slavery into historic site narratives. Skipper has also received a 2020 Mississippi Institutions for Higher Learning Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion Award and a University of Mississippi Diversity Innovator Award. She co-edited (with Michele Coffey) the book Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a US Region (2017) and recently published an autoethnography, Behind the Big House: Reconciling, Slavery, Race and Heritage in the U.S. South with the University of Iowa Press's Humanities and Public Life Series.
Brendan Nicholaus Slocumb was raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and holds a degree in music education (with concentrations in violin and viola) from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. For more than twenty years he has been a public and private school music educator and has performed with orchestras throughout Northern Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC. He is currently working on his second novel.
Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835, and the novels The Story of Land and Sea, Free Men, and The Everlasting. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Granta, and Literary Hub. She lives in New Orleans, and recently served as the Eudora Welty Chair for Southern Literature at Millsaps College.
Carlie Sorosiak is the author of the novels I, Cosmo and Leonard (My Life as a Cat), as well as the picture books Everywhere with You, illustrated by Devon Holzwarth, and Books Aren't for Eating, illustrated by Manu Montoya. She lives in Georgia with her husband and their American dingo.
Stuart Stevens is the author of seven previous books, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, and Outside, among other publications. He has written extensively for television shows, including Northern Exposure, Commander in Chief, and K Street. For twenty-five years, he was the lead strategist and media consultant for some of the nation’s toughest political campaigns. He attended Colorado College; Pembroke College, Oxford; Middlebury College; and UCLA film school. He is a former fellow of the American Film Institute.
Katherine St. John is a native of Mississippi and a graduate of the University of Southern California who spent over a decade in the film industry as an actress, screenwriter, and director before turning to penning novels. When she’s not writing, she can be found hiking or on the beach with a good book. Katherine’s novels are The Lion’s Den and The Siren.
Robert St. John is the author of eleven books and owns the Crescent City Grill, Mahogany Bar, Tabella, Ed's Burger Joint, The Midtowner, and El Rayo Tex-Mex in Hattiesburg Mississippi. For twenty years, St. John has written a weekly syndicated newspaper column and has been named Mississippi's top chef numerous years. St. John is also the creator, producer, and co-host of the PBS series Palate to Palette. In 2009, he founded Extra Table, a nonprofit organization providing healthy food to soup kitchens and pantries. He is a founding member of the Independent Restaurant Coalition and was an integral part of a small group that recently secured $28.6 billion in grants to aid independent restaurants affected by the COVID crisis. He and his wife, Jill, have two children, Holleman and Harrison.
Nic Stone was born and raised in a suburb of Atlanta, GA, and the only thing she loves more than an adventure is a good story about one. After graduating from Spelman College, she worked extensively in teen mentoring and lived in Israel for a few years before returning to the US to write full-time. Growing up with a wide range of cultures, religions, and backgrounds, Stone strives to bring these diverse voices and stories to her work.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University, and the author of Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith A. Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary. A native of Harlem, she lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Anthony Thaxton has won awards as a painter, an educator, and a television producer and filmmaker. He produced the acclaimed documentary Walter Anderson: The Extraordinary Life and Art of The Islander with Robert St John and wrote/designed the companion book. Anthony's vibrant paintings have been featured on television and in numerous books and magazines. Anthony filmed/directed/edited Palate to Palette with Robert St. John and Wyatt Waters, and his photos and videography have been featured on Good Morning America, Fox and Friends, and CNN.com. He was the 2019 Mississippi College Distinguished Art Alumnus of the Year. Anthony lives in Raymond, Mississippi, where he runs Thaxton Studios with his wife and children. He is currently working on a film on the life of Eudora Welty.
Angie Thomas was born, raised, and still resides in Jackson, Mississippi, as indicated by her accent. She is a former teen rapper whose greatest accomplishment was an article about her in Right-On Magazine. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Belhaven University and an unofficial degree in Hip Hop. She can also still rap if needed. Angie is an inaugural winner of the Walter Dean Myers Grant 2015, awarded by We Need Diverse Books. Her debut novel, The Hate U Give, started as a senior project in college. It was later acquired by the Balzer+Bray imprint of HarperCollins Publishers in a 13-publisher auction and debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, winning the ALA’s William C. Morris Debut Award and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award (USA), the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize (UK), and the Deutscher Jugendliterapreis (Germany). The Hate U Give was adapted into a critically acclaimed film from Fox 2000, starring Amandla Stenberg and directed by George Tillman, Jr.
Angie’s second novel, On The Come Up, is a #1 New York Times bestseller as well, and a film is in development with Paramount Pictures with Angie acting as a producer. In 2020, Angie released Find Your Voice: A Guided Journal to Writing Your Truth as a tool to help aspiring writers tell their stories. In 2021, Angie returned to the world of Garden Heights with Concrete Rose, a prequel to The Hate U Give focused on seventeen-year-old Maverick Carter that debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
Sami Thomason-Fyke (she/her) is a Youth Services Specialist at the Lafayette County and Oxford Public Library. She was formerly a bookseller, events coordinator, and social media coordinator at Square Books in Oxford, MS. You can keep up with her reading recommendations at samisaysread.com. @SamiSaysRead
Adam Trest is a fine artist and illustrator who has appeared on HGTV’s HomeTown with custom surface design collaborations. Raised in the South, Adam is inspired by the deep-rooted traditions found in southern culture and his imagery is heavily influenced by flora and fauna of the southeastern United States. He lives in Laurel, Mississippi, and you can see more of his work at www.adamtrest.com.
Michael W. Twitty is the author of The Cooking Gene, winner of the James Beard Foundation Book of the Year Award. He is a highly sought after speaker and consultant at food events and festivals, and a member of two Jewish speaker's bureaus. He has appeared on programs with Andrew Zimmern (Bizarre Foods America), Henry Louis Gates (Many Rivers to Cross), Padma Lakshmi (Taste the Nation), Michelle Obama's Waffles and Mochi, and most recently Netflix's High on the Hog. He is a TED Fellow and was named as a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. Michael has also filmed his first MasterClass course which premiered in 2022.
Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated writer, poet, and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books, and volumes of essays and poetry. For her seminal work The Color Purple, Ms. Walker won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983.
Walker has written many bestsellers, including The Temple of My Familiar; By the Light of My Father’s Smith; Possessing the Secret of Joy; and We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness. In collaboration with the British-Indian filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, she published Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Binding of Women, which led to a documentary film of the same name.
Her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages, and her books have sold more than fifteen million copies. In 2006, Ms. Walker became one of the inaugural inductees of the California Hall of Fame, and in 2007, her archives were opened to the public at Emory University in her birth state of Georgia. Ms. Walker was awarded the Mahmoud Darwish Literary Prize for Fiction in 2016.
As an activist and social visionary, Walker believes that learning to extend the range of our compassion is activity and work available to all—and she has a proven record as a staunch defender of the rights of all living beings. Her latest book, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, edited by Valerie Boyd, will be released in April.
Renowned watercolorist Wyatt Waters works solely on location. His philosophy is “if it is interesting to see, it can be a painting.” This approach has led to the printing of seven successful solo books and four collaborative publications with Mississippi restauranteur Robert St. John. Waters, along with St. John, can be found on Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s Palate to Palette.
A recipient of the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters, and the Mississippi Library Association’s Special Award, Waters served as a faculty member for Plein Air South.
He has had numerous solo exhibitions at museums such as Mississippi Museum of Art, Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Meridian Museum of Art, and Jackson Municipal Gallery. His work can be found in collections including those of two former presidents and several U.S. senators. He also is a past president and founding member of the Mississippi Watercolor Society and has had paintings in the national exhibitions of the National Watercolor Society and the National Society of Painters in Casein and Acrylic.
His eponymous gallery, recently recognized as Best Gallery in Mississippi by Mississippi Magazine, features the catalogue of his original work and giclée prints.
Lawrence Wells, author of In Faulkner’s Shadow, is the director of Yoknapatawpha Press in Oxford, Mississippi, which he established with his late wife Dean Faulkner Wells. Wells cofounded the quarterly literary journal The Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review. Author of two historical novels, Rommel and the Rebel and Let the Band Play Dixie, Wells was awarded the 2014 Faulkner-Wisdom gold medal for narrative non-fiction at the Words and Music Festival in New Orleans. He scripted the Emmy-winning 1994 PBS regional documentary Return to the River narrated by James Earl Jones.
Claire Whitehurst (b. 1991, Baton Rouge, Louisiana) is a painter, printmaker and ceramicist based in Jackson, MS. Claire received her BFA from the University of Mississippi in 2015, her Post Baccalaureate from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the University of Iowa in 2020. In 2018, she was the recipient of the Stanley Fellowship for International Research where she studied polychromatic cave paintings and engravings in southern France. She draws from the landscape and atmosphere of the South, exploring queer narrative, memory, time, and identity through color, form, surface and space. Her work plays with boundaries of emotion through formalism as well as through the relationship between image and object.
Curtis Wilkie covered civil rights activity in Mississippi in the 1960s and afterward served as a national and international correspondent for a quarter century at the Boston Globe. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
Antoine Wilson is the author of the novels Mouth to Mouth, Panorama City, and The Interloper. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Quarterly West, and Best New American Voices, among other publications. He is a contributing editor at the literary magazine A Public Space and lives in Southern California.
Ashley Woodfolk has loved reading and writing for as long as she can remember. She graduated from Rutgers University and worked in children’s book publishing for over a decade. Now a full-time mom and writer, Ashley lives in a sunny Brooklyn apartment with her cute husband, her cuter dog, and the cutest baby in the world. Her books include The Beauty That Remains, When You Were Everything, the Flyy Girls Series and Blackout.
Jerid P. Woods, also known as Akili Nzuri, is a writer, educator, PhD Candidate, and literary influencer. He was born and raised in Natchez, MS and survives on an unwavering passion to ignite a love for reading in the youth. He exists as a living testimony to the power of shared stories and knowing one’s self. He is the owner and creator of Ablackmanreading.com and the Instagram blog: @ablackmanreading. He is also a part of the Instagram show: @booksarepopculture where he and his cohost discuss books in a new revolutionary way that centers reading as part of popular culture.
Willie Wright is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Florida and the 2022 Scholar-in-Residence at Rice University's Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning. His writing appears in Ryan Dennis and Jessica Bell Brown's A Movement in Every Direction: A Great Migration Critical Reader. His forthcoming text, On Live Oak and Holman: Place and Public Art in Houston's Third Ward, is a history of black contemporary art and urban development in this historically black arts community.
Snowden Wright is the author of the novel American Pop, a Wall Street Journal WSJ+ Book of the Month, selection for Barnes & Noble's "Discover Great New Writers" program, Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Okra Pick, and NPR Favorite Book of the Year. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia University, he has written for The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, The Millions, and the New York Daily News, among other publications, and previously worked as a fiction reader at The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris Review.
Wright was awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the 2018 Sewanee Writers' Conference, and his debut novel, Play Pretty Blues, won the 2012 Summer Literary Seminars' Graywolf Prize. Recipient of the Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship from the Carson McCullers Center, he has attended writing residencies at Yaddo, Escape to Create, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Stone Court, Monson Arts, and the Hambidge Center. Wright lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi, where he is at work on his third novel, forthcoming from HarperCollins.
Steve Yarbrough is the author of eleven books, most recently the novel The Unmade World, due out in January 2018. His other books are the nonfiction title Bookmarked: Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, the novels The Realm of Last Chances, Safe from the Neighbors, The End of California, Prisoners of War, Visible Spirits and The Oxygen Man, and the short story collections Veneer, Mississippi History and Family Men. His work has been published in several foreign languages, including Dutch, Japanese and Polish, and it has also appeared in Ireland, Canada, and the U.K. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award and the Robert Penn Warren Award. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
The son of Mississippi Delta cotton farmers, Steve is currently a professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College. He has two daughters—Lena Yarbrough and Antonina Parris—and is married to the Polish writer Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough. They live in the greater Boston area.
Steve is an aficionado of jazz and bluegrass music, which he plays on guitar, mandolin and banjo, often after midnight.
Adrienne Young is a foodie with a deep love of history and travel and a shameless addiction to coffee. When she's not writing, you can find her on her yoga mat, sipping wine over long dinners or disappearing into her favorite art museums. She lives with her documentary filmmaker husband and their four little wildlings in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling Sky in the Deep duology and the Fable duology.
Kyle Zimmer is the President, CEO and Co-founder of First Book, a nonprofit social enterprise advancing educational equity for children (ages 0-18) in underserved communities. First Book's systemic approach is powered by integrated models that aggregate the voice, knowledge and purchasing power of adults serving low-income children, a network currently numbering 535,000.
Through its research arm, First Book generates real-time data that shapes the organization's design and informs the broader social sector. The organization responds to the barriers and concerns expressed through these studies in a variety of ways, for example:
• First Book provides the widest range of high quality, culturally relevant books (17 million books/year), basic needs items and educational resources for free or at the lowest costs possible through the First Book Marketplace.
• The organization collaborates with experts to expedite educators' access to evidence-based strategies on educator-identified topics, ranging from early literacy to supporting children experiencing grief, loss and trauma.
Operating in the U.S. and Canada, First Book has provided more than 225 million books/resources, with a retail value of more than $2 billion. Kyle and First Book have received awards from the Library of Congress, the National Book Foundation, the National Education Association Foundation, the Authors Guild, and others. Kyle is a Fellow with the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship; she serves on the board of directors for Ashoka and Dr. Seuss Enterprises, L.P.
An attorney, Kyle received her juris doctor from The George Washington University.