Betsy was appointed director of the Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA) in December, 2001. Previously, she served as executive director of the Mississippi Arts Commission. Since arriving at MMA, Bradley has overseen significant growth of the institution, shepherding two capital campaigns that resulted in a move to a completely renovated facility, and the creation of The Art Garden, the first new public green space in downtown Jackson since the 1970s. Committed to making MMA relevant to its community, Bradley works in partnership with many local cultural, social service, and history organizations to create opportunities for mutually beneficial collaborations. This work has resulted in prestigious federal and national foundation grant awards and recognition for MMA, including the 2008 Governor's Arts Award for Leadership and the 2010 National Medal for Museum and Library Service from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. More recently, the Women's Foundation of Mississippi honored Bradley as one of their 2019 Women of Vision, and she received the 2023 Governor's Arts Award for Leadership in Visual Arts and Community.

Bradley is a graduate of Vanderbilt University with a master's degree in English, and of Millsaps College with a bachelor's degree in English. She was elected to membership of the Association of Art Museum Directors in 2012 and in 2022 was appointed to its board. In addition, she has served on the boards of Americans for the Arts, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, and the Southern Arts Federation. She has also served on the Steering Council for the Mississippi Economic Council's Blueprint Mississippi Project, the 50th Reunion of the Mississippi Freedom Riders, and continues to serve on the executive committee of Downtown Jackson Partners.

Jimmy was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He earned his MFA from the University of Mississippi. He is the author of five novels and lives in New York.

Tracy is a researcher, editor, and writer in Jackson, Mississippi. She manages the book reviews for the Mississippi Books Page in the Clarion-Ledger and Hattiesburg American newspapers and is the editor of the forthcoming Conversations with Ellen Gilchrist (University Press of Mississippi).

Patrick lives, works, and plays in and around Monteagle, Tennessee. He has written speeches for Congressional candidates, taught inner-city high-school English, and earned a master's degree in theology. 

Since 2012, Patrick has been a free-lance writer, social-media content creator, and website designer. He is also the executive director of the Mountain Goat Trail Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to creating a walking and cycling trail on a former railroad bed. 

Patrick is a content ambassador for Territory Run Co.

William is a painter, writer, arts advocate, and commentator.

​The American landscape, its flora, and fauna are essential elements in Dunlap’s art, as are certain iconic Old Masters, such as Rembrandt’s series of self-portraits, which he quotes in paintings and constructions.

​He calls what he does Hypothetical Realism. “The places and situations I paint aren’t real…but they could be.”

​Allegory is ever present in this work. Whether on the page or in the picture plane, Dunlap expects the viewer to meet him halfway. There is nothing backward-looking about narrative art. On the contrary, one can hardly contemplate something more contemporary or edgy.

​In a career spanning more than four decades, Dunlap has exhibited internationally and is included in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art. He has received awards and honors from the Danforth, Rockefeller, Lila Wallace, and Warhol Foundations, as well as the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and the Mississippi Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Dunlap, (University Press of Mississippi, 2006) with essays by Rick Gruber and Julia Reed, remains a definitive book of the artist’s work. Short Mean Fiction - Words and Pictures (Nautilus Press, 2016) is Dunlap’s initial foray into literary fiction with stories drawn from decades of sketchbooks accompanied by reproductions of original drawings.

​William Dunlap maintains studios in Coral Gables, Florida; McLean, Virginia; and Mathiston, Mississippi, and can be contacted through his website.

John hosts the television show TrueSouth (SEC Network, ESPN, & Hulu), now in its sixth season, and serves Garden & Gun as a columnist. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, named a best book of 2017 by NPR and a dozen others. Twice winner of the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, presented 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. A native of Clinton, Georgia, he teaches in the low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction at the University of Georgia and serves the University of Mississippi as writer-in-residence for the Department of Writing and Rhetoric, director of the Mississippi Lab, founder of the Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, and founding director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. Edge lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife Blair Hobbs, an artist and university teacher.

Helen is the author of five books including the New York Times bestselling American Housewife and Southern Lady Code. She writes humor for Garden & Gun and The New Yorker. Raised in Alabama, she lives with her husband in New York City.

W. Ralph 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 has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, all with W. W. Norton. She is also the author of 3 books of prose: Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs; Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother, a collection of essays; and The Tilted World, a novel co-authored with her husband Tom Franklin. Beth Ann's poetry has been in over fifty anthologies, including Best American Poetry, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Poets of the New Century, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year.

Tom is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which was

nominated for nine awards and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the prestigious Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger Award. His previous works include the Edgar-winning story, Poachers, from the collection under the same title, as well as The Tilted World, which he co-authored with Beth Ann Fennelly, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk. Winner of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, he teaches in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.

JC grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and holds degrees from The University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Mississippi Medical Center. He is an avid reader and reviewer of literary fiction. He promotes authors and their stories while cultivating bookish community through his Instagram page @jcgrenn_reads, where he often features original artwork. He is a recurring reviewer of new literary fiction for the Mississippi Books Page featured in the 'Clarion Ledger' and 'Hattiesburg American'. He lives in Jackson, MS where he works an Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and and Pediatrics.

A resident of Oxford, Mississippi, Sarah is a retired lawyer and (not retired) fine artist who has redirected her creative juices towards writing and illustrating children's books. Her published work includes Puzzled by Pink, Paint Me!, and Dress Me!. She will be debuting her illustrations for One Mississippi, a children's book based on the newly adopted state song of Mississippi by Steve Azar, at this year's Mississippi Book Festival.

Robby 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.

The stories of investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell have helped put four Klansmen and a serial killer behind bars. His stories have also helped free two people from death row, exposed injustices and corruption, prompting investigations and reforms as well as the firings of boards and officials. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a longtime member of Investigative Reporters & Editors, and a winner of more than 30 other national awards, including a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grant. After working for three decades for the statewide Clarion-Ledger, Mitchell left in 2019 and founded the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.

A Jackson, Mississippi native, Michael Morris has served as the director of the Two Mississippi Museums-Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum-since 2023. He previously served in several roles during his eight years at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Morris earned his bachelor's degree in history and master's degree in political science from Jackson State University, where he worked at the Margaret Walker Center and Fannie Lou Hamer Institute on Citizenship and Democracy.

Morris received his supervisory management certificate from the Mississippi State Personnel Board and is currently completing its Certified Public Manager Program. Morris completed the Stennis Institute's State Executive Development Institute program at Mississippi State University. He was a member of the commission tasked with commemorating the city of Jackson's bicentennial in 2022 and has written markers for the Mississippi Freedom Trail. He currently serves on the advisory board of the Mississippi Book Festival. Morris was the Mississippi archivist for the Our Story, Our Terms civil rights project at Duke University.

In addition to serving on the book festival board of directors since the very beginning, Scott is a member of the Mississippi Arts Commission and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. He is also co-owner of Pass Christian Books/Cat Island Coffeehouse in Pass Christian and Gulfport. Before all of that, he received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Penn State University, Millsaps College, and Tulane University.

Aimee is the author of the New York Times bestselling illustrated collection of nature essays World of Wonders, chosen as Barnes & Noble's Book of the Year and as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. She has published four award-winning poetry collections and is the poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the storytelling branch of the Sierra Club. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her family and is a professor of English and creative writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.

Dustin Parsons is the author of Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, With Diagrams. His work appears recently in The Georgia Review, Brevity, Waxwing, and many other magazines. He teaches writing and literature at the University of Mississippi.

Catherine 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.

Marshall, 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.

Ellen, 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.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of National Bestseller, The American Daughters, a New York Times Editor’s Choice published by One World Random House. He is the recipient of the 2023 Louisiana Writer Award and the Black Rock Senegal Residency. He also wrote The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, which was published by One World Random House in August 2021. It is the 2023 One Book One New Orleans selection. The book was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and longlisted for the Story Prize. The book was also selected to represent Louisiana at the 2023 National Book Festival. His first book, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. It was longlisted for the 2021 DUBLIN Literary Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. The novel was also a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His work appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Kenyon Review, and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Ruffin was the 2022 Grand Marshal of the Mardi Gras Krewe of House Floats and recipient of the 2022 Louisiana Board of Regents ATLAS grant.

Katy was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of the novels The Story of Land and Sea, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and one of Vogue's Best Books of 2014; Free Men; and The Everlasting, a New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of 2020. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Granta, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is also the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835. She lives in New Orleans.

Heather Marie Stur, Ph.D., is professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi and co-director of the Dale Center for the Study of War & Society. She is the author of four books, including 21 Days to Baghdad: General Buford Blount and the 3rd Infantry Division in the Iraq War (Osprey Publishing, 2023), finalist for the Army Historical Foundation's Distinguished Writing Award. Stur's other books include Saigon at War: South Vietnam and the Global Sixties (Cambridge 2020), The U.S. Military and Civil Rights Since World War II (ABC-CLIO 2019), and Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (Cambridge 2011). She is also co-editor of Integrating the U.S. Military: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation Since World War II (Johns Hopkins 2017). Stur’s op-eds and articles have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, National Interest, Orange County Register, Diplomatic History, War & Society, and other journals and newspapers. In 2013-14, Stur was a Fulbright scholar in Vietnam, where she was a visiting professor on the Faculty of International Relations at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City. Stur and her husband, Jay Van Orsdol, live in Hattiesburg with their children Angus, Ignatius, and Stephanie.

Sami is a former bookseller, events manager, and youth specialist from Oxford, MS. After getting her degree in English Literature from Millsaps College, Sami worked at Square Books and Square Books, Jr. for 5 years before moving to the Lafayette County and Oxford Public Library. She also had a brief stint as a ride operator at Walt Disney World post-college and has the wild stories to prove it. She now works for Como Sales as a publishing sales representative and travels all over the South to sell to independent bookstores. This is her fifth time moderating at the Mississippi Book Festival! 

M.O. is the author of the novels The Big Door Prize and My Sunshine Away, which was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Pat Conroy Award for Southern Fiction. His first book, a story collection titled The Prospect of Magic, won the Tartt's First Fiction Prize. His fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Southern Review, Garden and Gun, New York Times and others. His latest novel, The Big Door Prize, has been adapted for television by Emmy winning Writer/Producer David West Read (Schitt's Creek) and is now streaming on Apple TV. He lives in New Orleans with his wife and family, where he directs the Creative Writing Workshop MFA program at the University of New Orleans.

Lawrence's "Ghostwriter" memoir tells of ghostwriting a novel about the "Fair Youth" of Shakespeare's sonnets. It was awarded the narrative non-fiction prize at the Words and Music Festival in New Orleans. His memoir "In Faulkner's Shadow," about his marriage to Dean Faulkner Wells, niece of author William Faulkner, was published by University Press of Mississippi in 2020. Wells is also the author of three historical novels,: Rommel and the Rebel, Let the Band Play Dixie (Doubleday & Co) and Fair Youth (Sanctuary Editions), a finalist for the 2024 Hawthorne Prize.

Jerid, also known as Akili Nzuri, is a writer, educator, Ph.D. candidate, and literary influencer. He was born and raised in Natchez, MS, and survives on an unwavering commitment to igniting a passion for reading in the youth; he also exists as a living testimony to the power of shared stories and knowing oneself. He owns and creates Ablackmanreading.com and the Instagram blog: @ablackmanreading. 

Nicola is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of Instructions for Dancing; Everything, Everything; and The Sun Is Also a Star, and is a coauthor of Blackout. She is a National Book Award finalist, a Michael L. Printz Award recipient, a Coretta Scott King-John Steptoe New Talent Award winner and the first Black woman to hit #1 on the New York Times Young Adult best-seller list. Two of her novels have been made into major motion pictures. She's also the copublisher of Joy Revolution, a Random House young adult imprint dedicated to love stories starring people of color. She grew up in Jamaica and Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the novelist David Yoon, and their daughter.