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“The Willie Morris Awards for Southern Writing Awards Ceremony”

This year’s Oxford Conference for the Book includes the awards ceremonies for the Willie Morris Awards for Southern Writing, which came to the University of Mississippi in 2020 to be administered by the Department of Writing and Rhetoric in honor of Willie Morris, a UM writer-in-residence and instructor from 1980 to 1991. Awards are given in both fiction and poetry.

The finalists are the first to be named since the awards moved to the university earlier this year. The awards were created in 2008 by Reba White Williams and Dave H. Williams of Connecticut to promote contemporary southern writers while also preserving the life and legacy of Morris, their longtime family friend. The three finalists for this year’s fiction prize are Chanelle Benz for The Gone Dead, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton for The Revisioners, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow for In West Mills.

Watch this session to find out who won!