Participants

Devreaux Baker

Devreaux Baker is the first poet laureate of Mendocino County, California, and a recipient of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award for her book Red Willow People. Her poetry collections include Hungry Ghosts, Red Willow People, Out of the Bones of Earth, Beyond the Circumstance of Sight, and Light at the Edge. She has facilitated workshops and taught poetry and creative writing in many venues, including public K–12 schools, and has directed national and international poetry workshops. She was a poetry editor of the first Anthology of Mendocino Women Poets, Wood, Water, Air, and Fire, and was producer of the Voyagers radio program of original student writing for KZYX Public Radio. Her awards and honors include the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prize from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, the International Fischer Prize for Poetry, the Hawaii Council for Humanities International Poetry Prize, a US Poets in Mexico Award, the Steve Kowit Poetry Award, and the Women’s Global Leadership Poetry Prize. She is a MacDowell Fellow, a Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Fellow, and a Hawthornden Castle Fellow. She currently directs the Mendocino Poets Reading Series and Open Mic at the Mendocino Art Center. Her poem “Blue Requiem” won this year’s Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing in the poetry category.

Rebecca Lauck Cleary

Rebecca earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in Southern Studies, both from the University of Mississippi. She is the Communications Specialist at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and each fall, she teaches a FASTrack section of EDHE 105: The Freshman Year Experience, designed to help first-year students adjust to the university.

At the Center, she writes news releases about the wide array of activities and events happening in and around Barnard Observatory, as well as news and feature articles for the Southern Register on topics ranging from profiles of interesting alumni to the research conducted by visiting scholars. She handles the Center’s social media, helps students with class registration, and assists with the Oxford Conference for the Book and the Eudora Welty Creative Writing contest.

She has long been a fan of the OCB and has attended the conference since the early 2000s.

She is fond of this quote: “We lose the habit of reading because we’re afraid of wasting our time. We think we need to be productive and ‘on the go’ at all times. But people are not machines, and you are nourished by naps and fiction and basking in the sunlight, no less than by food and drink.”

John T. Edge

John T. Edge, author of the forthcoming House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home, writes and hosts the television show TrueSouth and serves Garden & Gun as a columnist. His previous books include The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South. Edge directs the University of Mississippi’s Mississippi Lab, where he leads development of Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, and he serves as writer-in-residence for the UM Department of Writing and Rhetoric. Edge lives in Oxford with his wife, the artist Blair Hobbs, who painted the cover artwork for this year’s Oxford Conference for the Book.

W. Ralph Eubanks

W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of A Place Like Mississippi, which takes readers on a complete tour of the real and imagined landscapes that have inspired generations of authors. This is a book that honors and explores the landscape of Mississippi—and the Magnolia State’s history—and reveals the many ways this landscape has informed the work of some of America’s most treasured authors. Eubanks is Faculty Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, was the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016 to 2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She’s won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published six books, and her newest, The Irish Goodbye: Memoirs and Micro-Memoirs, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2026.

Melissa Ginsburg

Melissa Ginsburg is the author of the novels The House Uptown and Sunset City, the poetry collections Runoff (forthcoming in 2026 from Milkweed Editions), Doll Apollo, and Dear Weather Ghost, and three poetry chapbooks, Arbor, Double Blind, and Apollo. She is winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters poetry award and has been named the South Arts 2024 Mississippi State Fellow for Literary Arts. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Image, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Fence, Southwest Review, and other magazines. She is director of graduate creative writing programs at the University of Mississippi.

Natalie Green

Natalie Green is the senior manager of public programs at the National Book Foundation. Previously, Natalie was the manager of Los Angeles Programs at PEN America. She holds a BA in English and creative writing from UCLA, is a Brooklyn Book Festival Bookends committee member, and she organizes with North Brooklyn Mutual Aid.

Kathryn McKee

Kathryn McKee is the director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and McMullan Professor of Southern Studies and Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South, and her work has appeared in various journals, including American Literature, Legacy, Southern Literary Journal, and Mississippi Quarterly. She has a PhD in American Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Stephen Monroe

Stephen Monroe is chair and assistant professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. He is an affiliated faculty member in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and a steering committee member at the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies. Monroe serves as director of the Willie Morris Awards for Southern Writing and is the author of Heritage and Hate: Old South Words and Symbols at Southern Universities.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the New York Times bestselling collection of nature essays World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments. She also wrote four previous poetry collections, including Oceanic. Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. She is poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the storytelling arm of the Sierra Club, and is a professor of English and creative writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. Her most recent book is a collection of food essays, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees.

Susan Nicholas

Susan Nicholas is an instructor of composition and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi, where she gets to teach writing to her favorite group of people—first-year college students. She also coordinates the Willie Morris Awards for Southern Writing.

Xavier Sivels

Xavier Sivels is an instructor in Southern Studies and the undergraduate coordinator and Academic Common Market advisor for the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He earned his BA in history and philosophy from Virginia State University and a doctorate in history from Mississippi State University. His dissertation is “Freakish Man: Sexual Blues, Sacred Beliefs, and the Transformation of Black Queer Identity, 1870-1957.” Previously, Sivels was an instructor of early US history, Mississippi history, early world history, and African American history at Mississippi State University.

James G. Thomas, Jr.

James G. Thomas, Jr. is the associate director for publications at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture and, since 2015, director of the Oxford Conference for the Book. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and philosophy, a master’s degree in Southern Studies, and a master’s of fine arts in documentary expression, each from the University of Mississippi. He is editor or coeditor of several works, including Conversations with Barry Hannah and, with Jay Watson, the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha series. He also teaches in the University of Mississippi’s Department of Writing and Rhetoric, is on the Board of Directors for the University Press of Mississippi, and is past president of the Board of Governors for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.