Participants

Nadia Alexis

Nadia Alexis, a Harlem, New York, native, is a poet, writer, photographer, and daughter of Haitian immigrants. Her writing has been published in Poets & Writers, The Global South, Shenandoah, Wild Imperfections: An Anthology of Womanist Poems, and elsewhere. A fellow of both the Watering Hole and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, she has received several honors, including the 2023 Poet of the Year of the Haitian Creatives Digital Awards, a 2020 semifinalist of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, and 2019 Honorable Mention Poetry Prize from the Hurston/Wright College Writers Award. She holds an MFA and a PhD from the University of Mississippi. Beyond the Watershed (CavanKerry Press) is her first collection of poems.

A. H. Jerriod Avant

A. H. Jerriod Avant was born and raised in Longtown, Mississippi. His first book, Muscadine, (Four Way Books, 2023) received the 2024 Mississippi Institute of the Arts and Letters poetry award. Jerriod has received two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and an emerging-artist grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation of Boston. A former John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Avant is currently a University of Mississippi visiting assistant professor of English and creative writing there and writer-in-residence at Jackson State University.

Steve Almond

Steve Almond is the author of a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including All the Secrets of the World and the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His most recent book is Truth Is the Arrow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories. His essays and reviews have been published in venues ranging from The New York Times Magazine to Ploughshares to Poets & Writers, and his short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Mysteries, and Best American Erotica. Almond is the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and cohosted the Dear Sugars podcast with Cheryl Strayed for four years. He teaches at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and lives outside Boston with his family, his debt, and his anxiety.

Steve Azar

Steve Azar, a Mississippi Delta native, is a Grammy nominee, a hit songwriter, a recording artist, and a music producer. He has released seven critically acclaimed studio albums, as well as several no. 1 music videos. His latest release, My Mississippi Reunion, winner of the 2021 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for best contemporary album, features a collection of past and new songs inspired by Azar’s roots. The song “One Mississippi” is the official state song of Mississippi.

Robert Busby

Robert Busby grew up in the hill country of north Mississippi and has worked as a bandsaw
operator, bookseller, copywriter, driving-school instructor, powder coater, prep cook, produce
clerk, teacher, and satellite-television technician. He has a BFA from the University of
Mississippi and his MFA in fiction from Florida International University. His stories have
appeared in Arkansas Review, Cold Mountain Review, Footnote, Mississippi Noir, PANK,
Pleiades, Sou’wester, Surreal South, and elsewhere. Currently, he writes, runs, and raises two
humans with his wife in Memphis, Tennessee. Bodock is his first collection of short stories.

Addie E. Citchens

Addie E. Citchens was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and lives in New Orleans. A graduate of Jackson State University, she studied in the Florida State University Creative Writing Program and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the Oxford American’s “Best of the South,” Midnight & Indigo’s speculative fiction anthology, and other publications. Her blues history work features prominently in Mississippi Folklife, and she has been heard on The Mississippi Arts Hour on Mississippi Public Broadcasting. She was the inaugural recipient of the Farrar, Straus, and Giroux Writer’s Fellowship, and her short story “That Girl” won the O. Henry Prize. Dominion is her first novel.

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 assistant director of the Oxford Conference for the Book.

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.”

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 Eudora Welty Creative Writing contest.

Each fall, she teaches a FASTrack section of EDHE 105: The Freshman Year Experience, designed to help first-year students adjust to the university.

Robert Colby

Robert Colby is a University of Mississippi assistant professor of history and associate director of the Center for Civil War Research. His first book, An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South (Oxford University Press, 2024), won the Nau Book Prize from the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History, the 2025 nonfiction award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. An Unholy Traffic was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

Lindsay Currie

Lindsay Currie is a no. 1 New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of mysteries for young readers, including the Delta Games series and It’s Watching. She grew up on Nancy Drew and loves a good twisty tale. When she’s not writing, Currie can usually be found seeking an adventure of her own. She loves researching forgotten history, and she recently relocated from Chicago to a 220-acre farm in downstate Illinois, where she finally gets to see the stars every night and take hikes every day.

Camonghne Felix

Camonghne Felix, poet and essayist, is the author of Dyscalculia, which was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Build Yourself a Boat, which was longlisted for the National Book Award in poetry, shortlisted for the PEN/Open Book Awards, and shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Awards. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ poets.org, Freeman’s, Harvard Review, LitHub, The New Yorker, PEN America, Poetry, and elsewhere. Her essays have been featured in Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Teen Vogue, and other places. She is a professor of writing at The New School. Her latest book is Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom. The book, part-memoir and part-manifesto, is an interpretation of Black radical literary traditions and  reimagination of freedom through refusal.

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.

Edda L. Fields-Black

Edda L. Fields-Black is a specialist in the transnational history of West African rice, of peasant farmers in the precolonial Upper Guinea coast, and of enslaved laborers on antebellum Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations. She is author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora and coeditor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories. She is executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice” (with three-time Emmy Award–winning classical music composer, John Wineglass). Her most recent book is the Pulitzer Prize–winning Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War.

Fields-Black has worked as a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum, and the Senator John Heinz History Center. She and her family live in Pittsburgh, where she teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as director of the Dietrich College Humanities Center.

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.

Sarah Frances Hardy

Sarah Frances Hardy, a Mississippi native who calls Oxford home, earned a law degree from the University of Mississippi School of Law, earned an art degree from Davidson College, and studied at Parsons School of Design in New York and Paris. She has exhibited her paintings in galleries throughout the Southeast as well as in SoHo, New York. Hardy also writes and illustrates children’s books. Her published picture books include Puzzled by Pink, Paint Me!, and Dress Me!. She is the illustrator of One Mississippi.

Eddie Johnson

Eddie Johnson is a tribal member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, has served as the Special Projects/Media Program coordinator in the Department of Chahta Immi, and is now the tribal archivist. He is the author, with Jay Wesley, of Choctaw Traditions: Stories of the Life and Customs of the Mississippi Choctaw.

Tom Junod

Tom Junod is senior writer for ESPN, where his work has won an Emmy and the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. He is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and a winner of the James Beard Award for essay writing. Previously he was a staff writer at GQ and at Esquire. The film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was based on his article in Esquire. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and daughter.

Nicholas Lemann

Nicholas Lemann is a professor and dean emeritus at the Columbia Journalism School. He is the author of The Promised Land, The Big Test, Redemption, and Transaction Man. A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999, he lives in New York.

Sarah Thankam Mathews

Sarah Thankam Mathews is the author of All This Could Be Different, which was shortlisted for the Discover Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and 2022 National Book Award in fiction. Mathews’s debut novel was also a New York Times Editor’s Choice and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Vogue, Vulture, The Los Angeles Times, Time, Slate, and BuzzFeed. Mathews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. She lives and works in New York and writes the newsletter thot pudding.

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.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the New York Times bestselling author of two illustrated collections of essays: Bite by Bite and World of Wonders, chosen as Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year and as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. She has published four award-winning poetry collections and spent a decade serving as the poetry editor for environmental magazines, first for Orion and then Sierra. A professor of English and creative writing for more than twenty-five years, she gives firefly tours for Mississippi state parks and lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her family.

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.

Janisse Ray

Michael Reynolds

Dan Simon

Dan Simon is the founder and editor-in-chief of Seven Stories Press. Ashland is his debut novel. He lives in New York and New Hampshire.

A deeply moving family story unfolding in richly evocative prose during the final decades of the American century, Ashland is a book of metamorphoses—of the dance between permanence and transformation. The story takes place in Ashland, New Hampshire, a former mill town in the lakes region, and is told in six voices, among them Carolyn, a twenty-year-old writer at a turning point in her life; Gordon, who arrives in Ashland in the twilight of his years; Andy, a local boy; Geoff, Carolyn’s writing teacher at Plymouth State; and Edith, Gordon’s wife, who is inadvertently Carolyn’s spiritual guide and friend. Then there is Jennie, Carolyn’s aunt, who seems to offer her a model for how to live. But things aren’t always what they seem, and Carolyn must discover her own rules and make her own way.

Ashland is a debut novel of great intensity, beautifully told in the voices of many vivid characters and, through them, in the voice of Ashland itself.

Ira Sukrungruang

Ira Sukrungruang is the author of five books, including This Jade World; Buddha’s Dog and Other Meditations;Southside Buddhist, an American Book Award winner; and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy. He is the president of Sweet: A Literary Confection (sweetlit.com) and is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College.

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, The Mississippi Encyclopedia, Study the South, and, with Jay Watson, the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha series.

Thomas 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.

Annette Trefzer

Annette Trefzer is a professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She teaches American literature specializing in southern literature and Native American literature. Her book Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fictioncontributes to the emerging field of southern Native studies. She is the coeditor of several volumes of critical essays on William Faulkner. Most recently she published Exposing Mississippi: Eudora Welty’s Photographic Reflections.

Jay Wesley

Jay Wesley is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and he is director for the Department of Chahta Immi, which consists of the Choctaw Tribal Language Program, the Cultural Affairs Program, the Special Projects/Media Program, and the Chahta Immi Cultural Center. He is the author, with Eddie Johnson, of Choctaw Traditions: Stories of the Life and Customs of the Mississippi Choctaw.