Gerry Wilson
Official Panelist
2024 Participant · Fiction · Historical · Mississippi
Gerry is the author of a literary historical novel, That Pinson Girl (Regal House Publishing, February 2024), and a short story collection, Crosscurrents and Other Stories. Crosscurrents was runner-up for the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction and a nominee for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction Award. Gerry’s short fiction as recently appeared in Persimmon Tree and december magazine. She is a recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Artist Fellowship for 2025.
A seventh generation Mississippian, Gerry grew up in the red clay hills of the north that she writes about in That Pinson Girl and came of age during the turbulent civil rights era. She draws heavily on her Mississippi roots in most of her fiction. Like many young women of her generation, she married right after college, and until her first marriage ended, she was a stay-at-home mom to four sons. At the age of 50, she completed a master’s degree in English, and for more than twenty years, she taught English and creative writing to high school students.
Gerry considers herself a “self-taught” writer with much help along the way in workshops with authors she admires, among them Claire Messud, Andre Dubus, Antonya Nelson, and Jane Hamilton.
Gerry lives in Jackson, Mississippi, with her husband, Austin Wilson, a poet and retired Millsaps College professor.
Book Title(s)
- That Pinson Girl