News & Events

Jacksonville State University Professor Emeritus Harvey H. Jackson shares his thoughts on Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain.

Last year, New Yorker reporter Alice Gregory wrote to retired professional poker player Annie Duke about the possibility of profiling her. They spent the next few weeks engaged in a polite game of psychological warfare. Fortunately, Duke will speak in person at the Oxford Conference for the Book at 4:00 on Thursday, March 28, 2019. Her most recent book is Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts.

Salvatore Scibona will read from his new book, The Volunteer, to close the OCB (3:45 p.m. on Friday, March 29). Here he is in the New Yorker discussing the difference between fiction and history. An excerpt from The Volunteer, “Do Not Stop,” appears in the recent January 21 issue.

On April 10, 1994, during the Second Oxford Conference for the Book, John Grisham and Stephen King joined Barry Hannah for a conversation on everything from playing rock ‘n’ roll to surviving literary success. Watch the archival video footage from that session, “Surviving Success: Bestselling Authors Tell (Almost) All.”

Two University of Mississippi faculty members had books recognized by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as among the best pieces of southern literature published in 2018. Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy and Chris Offutt’s novel Country Dark were among eleven titles selected as the best southern books of 2018. AJC arts and books editor Suzanne Van Atten said it was “a particularly outstanding year for southern books.”