Speakers and Panelists

Steven Amsterdam is the author of Things We Didn’t See Coming, a debut collection of stories published to rave reviews in February 2009. Amsterdam, a native New Yorker, moved to Melbourne, Australia, in 2003, where he is employed as a psychiatric nurse and is writing his second book.

Claiborne Barksdale is executive director of the Barksdale Reading Institute at the University of Mississippi. He practiced law in Jackson for five years, was legislative coordinator for Senator Thad Cochran for four years, spent a year as a clerk for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and has served as counsel for communications companies since 1983.

Nicholas A. Basbanes is the author of A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books and six other volumes that have established him as “the leading authority of books about books.” His eighth book is a cultural history of paper and papermaking, tentatively titled Common Bond, to be published in 2010. With his wife, Constance Basbanes, he writes a monthly review of children’s books for Literary Features Syndicate, which they established in 1993.

John Brandon is the 2009–2010 John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. During the writing of his debut novel, Arkansas, published in 2009, he worked at a lumber mill, a windshield warehouse, a Coca-Cola distributor, and several small factories that produce goods made of rubber and plastic.

Harry C. Brown is a Jackson musician and Barry Hannah’s friend since childhood. They attended high school and Mississippi College together.

Bliss Broyard is the author of the story collection My Father, Dancing (1999), a New York Times notable book of the year, and the memoir/family history One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets (2007). Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Art of the Essay, and she is a frequent contributor to Elle Magazine and the New York Times Book Review. Broyard lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.

Jim Dees is the host of Thacker Mountain Radio, a literature and music program on Mississippi Public Broadcasting. He is the author of Lies and Other Truths, a collection of his newspaper columns, and the editor of They Write Among Us, a collection of fiction, nonfiction, and verse by Oxford, Mississippi, writers.

Margaret-Love Denman is coordinator of off-campus writing programs at the University of Mississippi and was previously the director of the creative writing program at the University of New Hampshire for 12 years. She is the author of the novels A Scrambling after Circumstance and Daily, Before Your Eyes. With novelist Barbara Shoup she published the interview collection Novel Ideas: Contemporary Writers Share the Creative Process and Story Matters, a textbook that combines stories, author interviews, instruction on elements of fiction, and writing exercises.

William Dunlap has distinguished himself as an artist, arts commentator, and educator since receiving his MFA from the University of Mississippi in 1969. His work can be found at museums across the nation and at United States embassies throughout the world. Dunlap, the book about his work, won the 2007 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Visual Arts Award.

W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of two books: Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark and The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South, released in May 2009. He has contributed articles to the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Preservation, and National Public Radio. He has been director of publishing at the Library of Congress since 1995.

Beth Ann Fennelly is the author of three poetry collections, Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, and a book of essays, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother. Fennelly has thee times been included in the Best American Poetry series and is a winner of a Pushcart Prize. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

Jennifer Ford is head of the Department of Archives and Special Collections in the University of Mississippi’s John Davis Williams Library. She is currently working on a PhD in history at the University of Mississippi.

Tom Franklin is a widely published author of essays and stories. He has published a collection, Poachers, and two novels, Hell at the Breech and Smonk. His third novel, Crooked Letter Crooked Letter, is due in summer 2010. Recipient of a 1999 Guggenheim Fellowship, he teaches in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.

John Grisham was a practicing attorney for nearly a decade after receiving his law degree from the University of Mississippi in 1981 and served in the Mississippi legislature from 1983 until 1990. After the publication of his first novel, A Time to Kill, in 1988, he has written 20 novels, all of which have become international best sellers. His first book of nonfiction, The Innocent Man, appeared in 2006, and his first story collection, Ford County, came out in 2009.

Anya Groner is a third-year MFA candidate in the University of Mississippi creative writing program. She is a recipient of a John and Renée Grisham fellowship and has had short stories published or forthcoming in journals including Flatmancrooked, Fiction Weekly, and Memphis Magazine.

William Harrison, novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter, founded the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Harrison is the author of 12 works of fiction and screenplays for two major motion pictures, Rollerball and Mountains of the Moon, and his work has been featured in dozens of anthologies and has appeared in many magazines.

Donna Hemans is the author of the novel River Woman, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in 2003. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals. She leads fiction writing workshops at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and twice served as the Lannan Visiting Creative Writer in Residence at Georgetown University.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer for the New Yorker magazine and frequently contributes the “Talk of the Town” section. He is the author of Politics: Observations and Arguments, 1966–2004, ¡Obamanos!: The Birth of a New Political Era, and One Million. Hertzberg was on the staff of the New Republic magazine for much of the 1980s and on the White House staff throughout the Carter administration, serving as the president’s chief speech writer from 1979 to 1981.

Richard Howorth is founder of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, and past president of the American Booksellers Association. He served as mayor of Oxford from 2001 to 2009. He was honored with the 2008 Authors Guild Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community.

Mark Jarman is the author of numerous collections of poetry and Iris, a book-length poem. His poetry and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Southern Review, Yale Review, and others. During the 1980s he and Robert McDowell founded, edited, and published the controversial magazine The Reaper, selections from which have been published in book form as The Reaper Essays (1996). Two collections of Jarman’s own essays have also been published; with David Mason, he coedited Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (1996). He is Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

Daniel W. Jones has been chancellor of the University of Mississippi since July 2009. He previously served as vice chancellor for health affairs, dean of the School of Medicine, and Herbert G. Langford Professor of Medicine at the University Medical Center (UMMC) in Jackson. A native Mississippian, he graduated from Mississippi College in 1971 and earned his MD and completed residency training at UMMC.

Ivo Kamps is chair of the English Department at the University of Mississippi. He has published numerous essays on Shakespeare, as well as the book Historiogtraphy and Ideology in Stuart Drama.

Donald M. Kartiganer is Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies Emeritus at the University of Mississippi and director of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. In addition to his work on Faulkner, he has published articles and book chapters on a number of modernist writers and theorists.

Watt Key is an award-winning Southern fiction author. He grew up and currently lives in southern Alabama with his wife and family. Key spent much of his childhood hunting and fishing the forests of Alabama, which inspired his debut novel, Alabama Moon. Alabama Moon won the 2007 E. B. White Read-Aloud Award and has been translated in five languages. The book was also released as a feature film in 2009. His second novel, Dirt Road Home, is scheduled for publication in July 2010.

John Langston has worked at the University Press of Mississippi for 26 years. His titles have included book designer, production manager, art director, and assistant director. His designs for Mississippi writers and artists have been crucial to the development of the Press’s regional publishing program.

Ingrid Law’s debut novel, Savvy, was published in May 2008 by Dial Books for Young Readers in partnership with Walden Media. Walden Media secured prepublication rights to develop the novel into a feature film. Savvy quickly made the New York Times Best Seller List and has won numerous awards, including recently being named as a 2009 Newbery Honor Book. Law lives in Boulder, Colorado, with her teenage daughter and is concentrating on writing.

Kathryn McKee is McMullan Associate Professor of Southern Studies and associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She has published articles about various Southern writers, including Sherwood Bonner, William Faulkner, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Josephine Humphreys, recently coedited a special issue of the journal American Literature called “Global Contexts, Local Literatures,” and is currently coediting a volume about representations of the South in film.

Jonathan Miles is a columnist for the New York Times, a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and a contributing editor to Men’s Journal, where he oversees books coverage. He published his first novel, Dear American Airlines, in 2008. During his years living in Oxford during the 1980s and 1990s, he studied with Barry Hannah.

E. Ethelbert Miller is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Whispers, Secrets, and Promises and First Light: New and Selected Poems. He is also the author of the memoir Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer (2000), selected in 2003 for the One Book, One City program sponsored by the Washington, D.C., Public Libraries. He has been director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University since 1974.

JoAnne Prichard Morris is an author, editor, and publisher. As executive editor of the University Press of Mississippi, she acquired a number of the Press’s signature regional publications, including Juke Joint, by Birney Imes.  Prichard also established the Press’s series in folklore and music. She is the coauthor of Barefootin’: Life Lessons on the Road to Freedom and Yazoo: Its Legends and Legacies. The widow of Willie Morris, she lives in Jackson.

Horace Newcomb is professor of telecommunications at the University of Georgia and the author of TV: The Most Popular Art, coauthor of The Producer’s Medium, and editor of six editions of Televison: The Critical View and The Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Television. He and Barry Hannah were undergraduates together at Mississippi College.

James V. O’Connor is president of O’Connor Communications, a public relations and marketing communications firm in Chicago, which specializes in author and book promotion through book signings, media coverage, on-line reviews, speaking engagements, and special events. O’Connor is also a freelance writer and the author of Cuss Control: The Complete Book on How to Curb Your Cursing and Another Man’s Treasure, a forthcoming novel.

Lynda M. O’Connor is executive vice president of O’Connor Communications in Chicago. Before joining that firm in 1993, she managed special projects, events, and publicity for the Chicago International Film Festival; conducted publicity for a $20 million fund-raising campaign for the Field Museum of Natural History; and was the cofounder and publicity director of the Children’s Legal Clinic.

Ted Ownby is professor of Southern Studies and History and director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He is the author of Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1965–1920 and American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830–1998.

Jon Parrish Peede, a University of Mississippi Southern Studies Graduate Program alumnus, is Director of Literature, Grants Programs for the National Endowment for the Arts. He is also director of the NEA National Initiative, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, a program that preserves the stories of U.S. military personnel who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, and their families. In addition, Peede has published nearly 100 articles, essays, and creative works. Most recently he coedited Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction.

Susan Phillips is director of the Lafayette County Literacy Council and director of Discovery Day School in Oxford. A native Oxonian and a graduate of the University of Mississippi, she has taught reading and creative writing to students from kindergarten to the university level.

Noel Polk, professor emeritus at Mississippi State University, is the author or editor of over a dozen volumes, including Outside the Southern Myth, Children of the Dark House, Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of her Work, and Reading Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury. He is editor of the Mississippi Quarterly. He and Barry Hannah were undergraduates together at Mississippi College.
 
Peggy Whitman Prenshaw teaches at Millsaps College and is the former Fred C. Frey Chair of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University. She is an author and editor of volumes on Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Spencer, contemporary Southern women writers, and Southern cultural history, former editor of the Southern Quarterly, and general editor of the Literary Conversations series published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Todd S. Purdum, an award-winning journalist, joined Vanity Fair as national editor in 2006. Purdum had spent the last 23 years at the New York Times, where he started as a copyboy in 1982. He most recently worked in the Washington bureau, where he also served as a diplomatic and White House correspondent.

John Quisenberry, a lifelong friend of Barry Hannah, grew up in Clinton, Mississippi.  After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1965, he served in the Navy as a fighter pilot aboard the USS Bon Homme Richard. Leaving the Navy, he flew as a crop duster in Mississippi and California. Ultimately he landed in Los Angeles, where for the past 30 years he has practiced law. 
 
Anne Rapp was a film supervisor in the film industry for 15 years more than 40 feature films, beginning with Tender Mercies in 1981 and ending with That Thing You Do in 1997. She then studied with Barry Hannah at the University of Mississippi and, after receiving an MFA, returned home to Texas to write and to work with the director Robert Altman.

Julia Rholes is dean of libraries at the University of Mississippi where she leads efforts to develop distinctive research collections and innovative library services and programs. She has held elected positions within the American Library Association, the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries, and the EPSCOR Science Information Group (ESIG).

Mark Richard is the author of two collections of stories, The Ice at the Bottom of the World and Charity, and the 1993 novel Fishboy: A Ghost Story, which is now in production as a major motion picture. Richard taught at the University of Mississippi in 1994–1995 as John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence. He currently lives in California and writes for film and television.

Lyn Roberts has been manager of Square Books since completing her law degree at the University of Mississippi. She is a member of the planning committee for the Oxford Conference for the Book and helps coordinate arrangements for the annual program.

Leila Salisbury has been the director of the University Press of Mississippi (UPM) since July 2008. Prior to her appointment, she was marketing director at the University Press of Kentucky. At UPM, she is responsible for the overall direction and management of the scholarly publishing operation, its editorial focus, and new technology initiatives and investments. She serves as primary liaison between the Press and UPM’s eight state university consortium partners.

Corinna McClanahan Schroeder is currently completing her MFA degree at the University of Mississippi where she is the recipient of a John and Renée Grisham Fellowship. Her work is forthcoming in Haydens Ferry, Measure, and the Country Dog Review. She is currently the student coordinator for the Grisham Visiting Writers Series and poetry editor for the Yalobusha Review.

Elaine H. Scott is former chair of the Arkansas State Board of Education, a member of the Education Commission of the States (1987–1997), and a leader in several organizations concerned with education, teacher training, libraries, and literacy. She has worked with the Reading Is Fundamental program since 1974 and received the RIF Leader for Literacy Award in April 1994.

Cynthia Shearer received the 1996 prize for fiction from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters for her first novel, The Wonder Book of the Air. Her widely acclaimed second novel, The Celestial Jukebox, weaves together the multiethnic culture found in the Mississippi Delta. While living in Oxford (1984–2003) she taught at the University of Mississippi, was a student and colleague of Barry Hannah, and served as curator of William Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak. She currently teaches at Texas Christian University and is writing a collection of short stories set in Fort Worth. 

Seetha Srinivasan recently retired from the University Press of Mississippi where she had worked for 29 years, with 10 of those years as director of the Press. During her tenure the Press published many books by and about prominent Mississippians and developed groundbreaking studies in popular culture, particularly in the area of comics studies and the Press’s highly regarded African American Studies list. Among the other international recognized works she developed for publication are Photographs by Eudora Welty, three titles by noted historian Stephen Ambrose, a retrospective of the work of William Dunlap, and most recently a collection of nonfiction by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.

Wells Tower has published short stories in the New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. His first collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, was published in 2009. He divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Brooklyn.

Jay Watson, professor of English at the University of Mississippi, is the author of Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner and numerous essays on Faulkner, Freud, legal theory, Lillian Smith, and Erskine Caldwell. He is editor of Conversations with Larry Brown, a collection of interviews Brown gave between 1988 and 2004.

Curtis Wilkie was a reporter for the Clarksdale Press Register in his home state of Mississippi during the 1960s and then served as a national and foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe for 26 years. He is coauthor, with Jim McDougal, of Arkansas Mischief: The Birth of a National Scandal and author of Dixie: A Personal Odyssey through Events that Shaped the Modern South. Wilkie holds the Kelly Gene Cook Chair of Journalism at the University of Mississippi.

Daniel E. Williams is Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at Texas Christian University. He is the editor of Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives and coeditor of Liberty’s Captives: Narratives of Confinement in the Print Culture of the Early Republic. A specialist in early American literature, he also teaches writing and contemporary American fiction. From 1985 to 2003 he was a professor at the University of Mississippi, where in 2000 he taught the first-ever seminar on Barry Hannah.

Steve Yates is assistant director/marketing director at University Press of Mississippi, and came to the Press as a publicist in 1998. Previously he was an assistant marketing manager at University of Arkansas Press. Yates is also the recipient grants from the Arkansas Arts Council and the Mississippi Arts Commission, and his short stories have appeared in TriQuarterly and Texas Review. His novel, Morkan’s Quarry, will be available in May 2010 from Moon City Press.