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.

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.

Historian, author, curator, and educator, Lonnie G. Bunch, III is the 14^th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education and research complex, who was appointed in June 2019.

Prior to assuming this position, Bunch was the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). In this position he provided strategic leadership in areas of scholarship, collections, fundraising and academic and cultural partnerships.

As a public historian, a scholar who brings history to the people, Bunch has spent nearly 30 years in the museum field and is one of the nation’s leading figures in the historical and museum community.

Prior to his July 2005 appointment as director of NMAAHC, Bunch served as the president of the Chicago Historical Society, one of the nation’s oldest museums of history.

Bunch has held several positions at the Smithsonian, and spent a number of years at both the National Museum of American History and the National Air and Space Museum.

A prolific and widely published author, Bunch has written on topics ranging from slavery, the black military experience, the American presidency, and all black towns in the American west to diversity in museum management and the impact of funding and politics on American museums.

In service to the historical and cultural community, Bunch has served on the advisory boards of several professional organizations. Among his many awards, he was appointed by President George W. Bush to the Commission for the Preservation of the White House in 2002 and reappointed by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Bunch has received honorary doctorates from an array of Universities including: Harvard University, Princeton University, Brown University, Dominican University, Roosevelt University, Rutgers University, Northwestern University, and Georgetown University.

Born in the Newark, N.J. area, Bunch has held numerous teaching positions across the country including American University; the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth; and The George Washington University. He received undergraduate and graduate degrees from American University in African American and American history.

He is married to Maria Marable Bunch, a museum educator. They have two daughters, Sarah and Katie.

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.

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.

Dhonielle Clayton is also the New York Times Bestselling author of The Belles series and the co-author of the Tiny Pretty Things duology, which is now a Netflix original series. She hails from the Washington, D.C. suburbs on the Maryland side. She taught secondary school for several years, and is a former elementary and middle school librarian. She is COO of the non-profit We Need Diverse Books. She runs the science fiction and fantasy book club Black Girls with Magic & Books. She’s an avid traveler, and always on the hunt for magic and mischief. Next up: Shattered Midnight, The Marvellers, Blackout, and The Rumor Game.

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.

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.

Allegory is ever-present in the work of William Dunlap, an artist and writer who refers to what he does as "hypothetical realism." "The places I paint and the people I write about aren't real... but they could be." He is the recipient of international fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and Lila Wallace Foundation, and his art is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, Mississippi Museum of Art, and United States Embassies throughout the world. Short Mean Fiction: Words and Pictures (2016), his initial foray into literary fiction, is followed by his most recent collection of short stories, Lying and Making a Living: Fiction with Footnotes (2021). He is author of Pappy Kitchens and the Saga of Red Eye the Rooster (2019) about the magnum opus by Mississippi folk artist, O. W. "Pappy" Kitchens, and the subject of DUNLAP (2006) published by the University Press of Mississippi with essay by J. Richard Gruber and foreword by Julia Reed. William Dunlap maintains studios in Mississippi and South Florida, and is married to the artist/writer Linda Burgess. They have one daughter, Maggie, also an artist and writer who lives in London. For more information visit williamdunlap.com

Lee Durkee is a graduate of the Mississippi public school system and was bussed to various schools throughout the Hattiesburg area. He later attended Pearl River Junior College, the University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Arkansas, and Syracuse University. He is the author of the novels Rides of the Midway (WW Norton, 2000) and The Last Taxi Driver (Tin House Books, 2020). His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Sun, The Best of the Oxford American, Zoetrope: All Story, Tin House, and Mississippi Noir. In 2022 Scribner will publish Stalking Shakespeare, a memoir about his obsession with trying to find a lost portrait of William Shakespeare. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

John T Edge, who lives and works in Oxford, has written or edited more than a dozen books including The Potlikker Papers. A history of the modern South, told through food, the book was named to more than a dozen "best book of the year" lists. Edge directs the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi and serves as a faculty member for the MFA Program in Narrative Nonfiction at The University of Georgia. Winner of the 2018 nonfiction prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, Edge was elected to the Georgia Writer's Hall of Fame in 2019.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

First elected to Congress in 2009, Gregg served five terms representing Mississippi’s 3^rd 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 115^th 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.

Maker of small things in Oxford, MS

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.

Holly Lange is a founder and current 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.

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.

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.

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.

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and a 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church. Deesha is also the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. Her work has been listed as Notable in the Best American Essays series, and her writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Brevity, dead housekeeping, Apogee Journal, Catapult, Harvard Review, ESPN’s The Undefeated, The Baltimore Review, TueNight, Ebony and Bitch magazines, and various anthologies. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and a past Pushcart Prize nominee for essay writing in Full Grown People.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Nicola Yoon is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers The Sun Is Also a Star and Everything, Everything, both of which were turned into major motion pictures. She grew up in Jamaica and Brooklyn and lives in Los Angeles with her husband—the novelist David Yoon—and their little girl. She’s also a hopeless romantic who firmly believes that you can fall in love in an instant and that it can last forever.