Speakers

Laurie Halse Anderson is the author of American Girl’s new animal adventure series, Wild at Heart. She is perhaps best known for her novel Speak, which was a National Book Award Finalist, a Michael L. Printz Honor book, a New York Times best seller, and an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. Anderson has also published four other novels—Fever 1793, Catalyst, Prom, and Twisted —and five picture books, including No Time for Mother’s Day and Turkey Pox.

Claiborne Barksdale is executive director of the Barksdale Reading Institute at the University of Mississippi. After earning BA and JD degrees from Ole Miss, 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. Barksdale lives in Oxford with his wife and three children.

Rick Bass was born in Texas and lived in Mississippi from 1979 to 1987 as a petroleum geologist, an experience that formed the basis for his book Oil Notes. He is the author of 21 other books, including The Watch, his first story collection, winner of the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, and a second collection, The Hermit’s Story, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Among his other awards are the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award. He currently lives and works in Montana’s Yaak Valley.

Billy Ray Brown, the eldest son of author Larry Brown, works for the City of Oxford and raises cattle in Yocona, Mississippi, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Mary Annie Brown was married to Larry Brown for 30 years and lives in the home that they built in Yocona, Mississippi. She works as an administrative assistant in Oxford.

Shane Brown, Larry Brown's younger son, is a teacher at Water Valley Elementary School and a coach at Water Valley High School in Water Valley, Mississippi. He lives with his wife and son in Lafayette County.

Kay Bonetti Callison is founder of the American Audio Prose Library, Inc., and winner of eight national spoken audio and broadcasting awards. As director of the American Audio Prose Library, Callison produced recorded reading performances and companion interviews with 132 distinguished authors as well as 55 related radio programs for local broadcast and national public radio distribution. Her interviews were edited for publication in the Missouri Review, and 15 are collected in the volume Conversations with American Novelists.

Nickole Brown is a poet and fiction writer. Her work has appeared in the Courtland Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, 32 Poems, Kestrel Review, the Writer’s Chronicle, Poets & Writers, and Mammoth Books’ Sudden Stories anthology. She also coedited the anthology Air Fare: Stories, Poems, and Essays on Flight. H er debut book, a novel-in-poems entitled Sister, is forthcoming. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she is director of marketing and development for a nonprofit, independent, literary press, Sarabande Books.

Kevin Canty is the award-winning author of the novels Into the Great Wide Open, Nine Below Zero, and Winslow in Love, as well as the short-story collections Honeymoon and Other Stories and A Stranger in This World. His work has been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Story, the New York Times Magazine, and other periodicals. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

Jean W. Cash, professor of English at James Madison University, is the author of Flannery O’Connor: A Life and of articles on O’Connor, William Styron, and others. She is currently working on a biography of Larry Brown.

Sarah Combs is the assistant director of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky. She previously worked as a librarian, as a Latin and creative writing teacher, and as a library specialist in the Collection Development Department of BWI, a book and audiovisual distributor that specializes in children’s and young-adult literature for public libraries.

Harry Crews is the author of 23 books, including The Gospel Singer, Naked in Garden Hills, The Hawk Is Dying, A Feast of Snakes, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Blood and Grits, All We Need of Hell, The Knockout Artist, The Mulching of America, Celebration, and An American Family: The Baby with the Curious Markings. Getting Naked with Harry Crews is a collection of 26 interviews with Crews from the publication of his first novel in 1968 to his retirement from the University of Florida in 1997. He is featured in the documentaries The Rough South of Harry Crews and Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.

Richard Corley and Larry Brown collaborated on the stage version of Brown’s novel Dirty Work. It originally played at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in January 1994 and has enjoyed subsequent performances, including productions at the Dallas Theatre Center and at the Hoka Theatre in the author’s hometown. Corley is artistic director of Madison Repertory Theatre in Wisconsin and has directed at Hartford Stage, Magic Theatre in San Francisco, Berkshire Theatre Festival, Philadelphia Theatre Company, and the Sovremennik Theatre in Moscow.

Jim Dees is the host of Thacker Mountain Radio, a literature and music program broadcast live in Oxford and rebroadcast on Mississippi’s public radio stations. He has written for the Oxford Eagle and is a former editor of Oxford Town, for which he still contributes a weekly column. Most recently, he edited the collection They Write among Us: New Stories and Essays from the Best of Oxford Writers.

Margaret-Love Denman, a native of Oxford and a graduate of the University of Mississippi, is associate professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of the novels A Scrambling after Circumstance, chosen for the Penguin Contemporary American Fiction series, and Daily, Before Your Eyes. With novelist Barbara Shoup she published the interview collection Novel Ideas: Contemporary Writers Share the Creative Processand Story Matters , a textbook that combines stories, author interviews, instruction on elements of fiction, and writing exercises.

Ellen Douglas, the pseudonym of Mississippi author Josephine Ayres Haxton, is a National Book Award finalist and the author of six novels and two story collections. She has also published two books of nonfiction, Truth:Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell and Witnessing, a collection of essays. Her first novel, A Family’s Affairs, was named one of the ten best fiction titles of the year by the New York Times, as was Black Cloud, White Cloud. She received Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Awards for The Rock Cried Out and A Lifetime Burning, was honored for her body of work by the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1989, and received the 2000 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.

Andre Dubus III is the author of The Cage Keeperand Other Stories and the novels Bluesman and House of Sand and Fog, which was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award and was made into a movie in 2003. He was one of three finalists for the 1994 Prix de Rome and has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the 1985 National Magazine Award for Fiction. Dubus has taught writing at Harvard University, Tufts University, and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. He and his wife, performer Fontaine Dollas Dubus, live in Massachusetts with their three children.

Clyde Edgerton is the author of eight best sellers, including Raney, Walking across Egypt, and Where Trouble Sleeps. The critical reception to his work led to his receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lyndhurst Fellowship, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and five notable book awards from the New York Times. He is also a musician and songwriter and a professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of three books: The Good Junk, The Genuine Negro Hero, and The Maverick Room. He coedited On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists and is a contributing editor of Callaloo. His Q uotes Community: Notes for Black Poets is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press (Poets on Poetry Series). Ellis teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the Lesley University low-residency MFA program.

Alejandro Escovedo has been hailed as a poet, as a storyteller, and as one of the most important musicians of the last quarter-century. He blends rock, folk, blues, and classically influenced music into a boundary-defying style that has won him a devoted following all over the world. Born into a large Mexican immigrant family in San Antonio, Escovedo has recorded eight albums under his own name, in the process winning numerous awards and accolades, including “Artist of the Decade” from No Depression magazine.

Robbie Ethridge is McMullan Associate Professor of Southern Studies and associate professor of anthropology at the University of Mississippi. She is the coeditor, along with Charles Hudson, of the volume The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540–1760 and the author of Creek Country: The Creek Country and Their World, 1796–1816. Her current research focuses on the involvement of the 17th-century Chickasaws in the Indian slave trade and the modern world economy.

Carlo Feltrinelli operates much of the Feltrinelli literary enterprise, which consists of approximately 90 bookstores and the publishing firm begun in 1954—initially as a library and gathering place for intellectuals and anti-fascists—by his father, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The firm, also led by Carlo’s mother, Inge Feltrinelli, published the first edition of Dr. Zhivago and has issued over 7,000 titles, including the works of Italo Calvino, Che Guevara, Simone de Beauvoir, Italo Svevo, and Richard Ford. Carlo Feltrinelli wrote the incredible story of his father’s life, published in the U.S. in 2002 under the title Feltrinelli: A Story of Riches, Revolution, and Violent Death.

Beth Ann Fennelly is the author of two poetry collections, Open House and Tender Hooks. Her poems have been appeared in the Best American Poetry Series volumes in 1996 and 2005, The Pushcart Prize 2001, and other anthologies. She received a 2003 Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her book of essays, Great with Child:Letters to a Young Mother, was published last year by W. W. Norton. Fennelly is assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of two books of poems, Blue Window and Five Terraces; two chapbooks, The Trinket Poems and Walking Wu-Wei’s Scroll; and a critical book, William Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature. Among the awards she has received are a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Rita Dove Poetry Award, and six Pushcart nominations. She is professor of English at the University of Mississippi, where she teaches a wide range of courses in poetry and in environmental literature.

Gary Fisketjon is vice president and editor at large at Alfred A. Knopf. He has edited the works of Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Jan McInerney, Cormac McCarthy, Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and others.

Jennifer Ford is head of the Department of Archives and Special Collections in the University of Mississippi’s John Davis Williams Library.

David Galef has published 13 books, including the novels Flesh, Turning Japanese, and How to Cope with Suburban Stress; the short-story collection Laugh Track; an edited anthology of essays called Second Thoughts: A Focus on Rereading; a coedited anthology of fiction called 20 over 40; and, most recently, the poetry collection Flaws. He is a professor of English at the University of Mississippi, where he also administers the MFA program in creative writing.

Matthew Guinn, assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is the author of After Southern Modernism: Fiction of the Contemporary South and articles in South to a New Place and A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South. He has also published a novel, The Resurrectionist.

Kimiko Hahn is an American poet of partly Japanese ancestry. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Narrow Road to the Interior; The Artist’s Daughter; Mosquito and Ant; Volatile; and The Unbearable Heart, which received an American Book Award. Hahn is the recipient of a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.

Gary Hawkins has written and directed six films. His second, The Rough South of Harry Crews, won an Emmy. The Rough South of Larry Brown, the latest in Hawkins’s ongoing series about working-class Southern authors, was picked by the Oxford American as one of 13 Essential Southern Documentaries. He teaches at teaches classes the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and is adapting two novels into screenplays for Capricorn Studios.

Karen Hesse has won popular and critical acclaim and numerous awards for her books for young readers, including most recently Aleutian Sparrow, Witness, and Stowaway. Her most famous book, Out of the Dust, won nine different awards ranging from a Newbery to an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book to a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Each of her other books has also received multiple awards. She is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Lynn Hewlett, lifelong friend of Larry Brown, owns and operates the Taylor Grocery restaurant in Taylor, Mississippi.

Arliss Howard has appeared in many American Repertory Theatre productions and in Full Metal Jacket, Ruby, and other films. He made his debut as screenwriter and film director with an adaptation of Larry Brown’s Big Bad Love, in which he starred with his wife, Debra Winger.

LeAnne Howe , an American Indian author, playwright, and scholar, is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She writes fiction, creative nonfiction, plays, poetry, and screenplays that primarily deal with American Indian experiences.  Her plays have been produced in Los Angeles, New York City, New Mexico, Maine, Texas, and Colorado, and she is the screenwriter and on-camera narrator for the 90-minute PBS documentary Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire. She is currently the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi.

Richard Howorth was elected mayor of Oxford in 2001. He is founder of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, and past president of the American Booksellers Association.

Suzanne W. Jones, professor of English at the University of Richmond, has published many articles on Southern literature and a book, Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties. She is the editor of a collection of essays, Writing the Woman Artist, and two story collections, Crossing the Color Line: Readings in Black and White and Growing up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature. She is coeditor of the essay collection South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture.

Robert Earl Keen is a Texas singer-songwriter who has released more than a dozen CDs and written more than 100 songs. Among his albums are Live Dinner, No Kinda Dancer, Gringo Honeymoon, Farm Fresh Onions, and What I Really Mean . He discovered Larry Brown through the novel Dirty Work, and the twoeventually met and became friends. Brown wrote a feature story on Keen for No Depression in 2001.

Robert C. Khayat , an avid reader, has been chancellor of the University of Mississippi since 1995.

Lauren Lanza is manager of Square Books Jr. in Oxford, Mississippi.

Jerry Leath (Jake) Mills, a retired English professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, recently donated his correspondence with Larry Brown to the University of Mississippi’s Department of Archives and Special Collections. The collection includes 31 letters as well as photographs and manuscripts.

Tim Lee for the past two decades has been a part of the indie rock scene in the South. Starting with his early ’80s recordings with the Windbreakers, Lee’s work has been praised by the likes of Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Creem. He has released a half dozen solo records. He and his wife, graphic artist Susan Bauer Lee, served, respectively, as producer/compiler and art director for Just One More, A Musical Tribute to Larry Brown.

Jill McCorkle is the author of five novels—The Cheer Leader, July 7th, Tending to Virginia, Ferris Beach, and Carolina Moon—and the story collections Crash Diet, Final Vinyl Days , and Creatures of Habit. McCorkle has received numerous awards, and her fiction has been four times selected by the New York Times Book Review for its Notable Books of the Year list. She received the New England Booksellers’ Association award in 1993 for her body of work in fiction, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. In 1996 she was included in Granta magazine’s celebration of Best of Young American Novelists, and in 2003 she was inducted in the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

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 has overseen books coverage since 2001. His work has been selected for inclusion numerous times in the Best American Sports Writing and Best American Crime Writing anthologies. During his years living in Oxford, which stretched from the late ‘80s to 2001, he developed a close friendship with Larry Brown, and he currently serves as an advisor to Brown’s literary estate. He lives in New York.

Rosemary Oliphant-Ingham is associate professor of English education at the University of Mississippi, where she teaches children’s and adolescent literature. She has published a biographical sketch of Louisa May Alcott and a biography of Karen Hesse.

John Osier grew up in Tennessee, worked as a newspaper reporter for the Memphis Press-Scimitar, and taught English at various Southern colleges. He is the author of three novels, Covenant at Coldwater; Rankin, Enemy of the State; and Edge. Osier was Larry Brown’s first creative writing teacher.

Pamela Pridgen received a master of library science degree from the University of Southern Mississippi and is director of the Library of Hattiesburg, Petal, and Forrest County. She has served as president of the Mississippi Library Association and is a board member of the Mississippi Library Commission.

Patrick Quinn chairs the English Department at the University of Mississippi. He coedited An Anthology of Colonial and Post-Colonial Fiction and is now researching American Decadent literature during the early 1900s.

Tom Rankin is director of the Center for Documentary Studies and associate professor of the Practice of Art and Documentary Studies at Duke University. A photographer, filmmaker, and folklorist, he currently chairs the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. His books include Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta, which received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Photography; “Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre”: Photographs of a River Life; Faulkner’s World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain; and Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible.

Shannon Ravenel was series editor of TheBest American Short Stories annual for 14 years and of New Stories from the South for 25 years. Formerly editorial director of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, she now directs her Algonquin imprint, Shannon Ravenel Books.

Mark Richard is the author of numerous short stories and three books of fiction: Charity, Fishboy, and The Ice at the Bottom of the World, which won the 1990 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. Among his ther awards are a Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award and the Mary Francis Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters. He has taught creative writing at Arizona State University, the University of Mississippi, the University of the South, and the Writer’s Voice in New York City. Richard now lives in Los Angeles, where he is working on his next novel and also writing for television and films.

Steven Rinella is a Michigan native and correspondent for Outside magazine. His essays and reporting have appeared in the New Yorker, Nerve, DoubleTake, The Best American Travel Writing (2004), and Field and Stream. His first book, The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine, a combination memoir, cookbook, and travelogue, was published in March 2006 to enthusiastic reviews from literary and food critics. While earning an MFA from the University of Montana, h e took a nonfiction workshop Larry Brown taught there in late 1999. “Of all my teachers, he had the strongest influence on me,” Rinella says.

Doug Robinson is professor of English at the University of Mississippi and local coordinator of the Open World Program, which the Library of Congress administers to increase mutual understanding between Russia and the United States.

Julia Rholes is dean of libraries at the University of Mississippi.

Margaret Bradham Thornton is the editor of Tennessee Williams’s Notebooks, recently published by Yale University Press. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Seattle Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and World Literature. She is a writer and independent scholar based in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Jay Watson, associate 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 was Visiting Fulbright Professor of English at the University of Turku and at Abo Akademi University, Finland, 2002–2003. He is editor of the newly published Conversations with Larry Brown , a collection of interviews Brown gave between 1988 and 2004.

Ben Weaver is a Minnesota singer-songwriter whose songs have been referred to as “gutter pulpit sermons.” Larry Brown called him “an American original whose voice and guitar are matched only by the power of his words. His songs are an incredible, haunting gift of music.”

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. In 2005 he received a special award for excellence in nonfiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Charles Reagan Wilson is the author of Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920, editor of Religion in the South, coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and editor of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. His other publications include a collection of essays titled Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis.

Debra Winger made her acting debut in Wonder Woman in 1977 and received Academy Award nominations as Best Actress for Urban Cowboy, Officer and a Gentleman, and Shadowlands. She joined her husband, Arliss Howard, on screen in Big Bad Love, based on Larry Brown’s story collection by that name.

Ethel Young-Minor is an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. She is coeditor of Black Sermons, a collection of African American sermons delivered from 1901 to 2000, and has published articles in the College Language Association Journal and Women Studies International. Her current research focuses on African American women in performance.

Steve Yarbrough, a native of the Mississippi Delta town of Indianola, is the author of three story collections and four novels. He has taught at California State University at Fresno since 1988. He was 1999–2000 Visiting Grisham Writer at the University of Mississippi, where he earned BA and MA degrees in English.

Shay Youngblood is the author of the novels Black Girl in Paris and Soul Kiss and a story collection, The Big Mama Stories. Her plays Amazing Grace, Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery, and Talking Bones have been widely produced. Her other plays include Black Power Barbie and Communism Killed My Dog. Among her many awards are a Pushcart Prize for fiction, a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, and several NAACP Theater Awards. She has taught creative writing at New York University and was the 2002–2003 John and Renée Grisham Visiting Southern Writer at the University of Mississippi.