2021 Oxford Conference for the Book Authors
Our 2021 Conference will be all virtual! Check back often for updates.
To see the times speakers will present, please visit the schedule page.
Cassie Beasley
Cassie Beasley is from rural Georgia, where, when she’s not writing, she helps out on the family pecan farm. She earned her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Circus Mirandus is her first novel.

Beth Ann Fennelly
Poet Laureate of Mississippi, Beth Ann Fennelly teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. She’s a proud affiliate of the Sarah Isom Center. She’s won grants and awards from the N.E.A., the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, and three books of prose: a book of nonfiction, Great with Child; next, The Tilted World, a novel she co-authored with her husband, Tom Franklin; and most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book. Fennelly and Franklin live in Oxford with their three children.

Craig W. Gill
Craig W. Gill is the Director of the University Press of Mississippi. He has worked at the press for more than 22 years rising from Senior Editor to Editor-in-Chief to Director. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin he has worked in scholarly publishing since 1990 in marketing and editorial at Northwestern University Press, the University of Chicago Press, the University Press of Kentucky, and the University Press of Mississippi. Over the course of his career he has acquired and published more than seven hundred books.

Tonia Lonie
Tonia Lonie is the business manager for the University Press of Mississippi (UPM). She is responsible for overseeing and managing the annual budget, publishing business, and human resource operations for UPM. Tonia joined UPM in 2015 and has over 20 years of professional experience which include: public accounting, human resources, retirement plan administration, project management, grant compliance, fraud analysis, internal control reviews, fixed assets, policy development, and process improvement. Tonia earned a bachelor of business administration in accounting from Jackson State University, a master of business administration from Delta State University, and is also a Certified Fraud Examiner.

Kathryn McKee
Kathryn McKee is McMullan Associate Professor of Southern Studies and Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, and director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. She is coeditor, with Deborah Barker, of American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, and her articles have 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. Dr. McKee’s areas of scholarly research include nineteenth-century American literature, the literature and culture of the nineteenth-century U.S. South, writing by women, global south studies, film studies, and humor studies.

Oge Mora
Oge Mora graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in illustration. When not painting in her studio, Oge is in the kitchen cooking her late grandmother’s recipes. Her first picture book, Thank You, Omu!, was a Caldecott Honor, a New York Times Notable Book and Editors’ Choice, and a Junior Library Guild selection. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Catarina Passidomo
Catarina Passidomo joined the faculty of the University of Mississippi in 2014. She is interested primarily in studying food systems to better understand and contest broader social systems and phenomena. Through work with her students and the Southern Foodways Alliance, she is investigating the connections between the food system and: migration between the Global South and the U.S. South; structural racism; economic inequality; and demographic and culinary changes in the American South. Catarina has published articles in Urban Studies; Geoforum; Agriculture and Human Values; The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development; and ACME, and has contributed chapters to two edited volumes on Food Sovereignty and the food-immigration nexus. In 2019, Catarina traveled to Lima, Peru on a Fulbright Teaching and Research.

Previous Speakers
