Participants

Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His newest
release, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension is a New York Times bestseller
and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His previous book, A Little
Devil in America, was a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize. In
2021, Abdurraqib was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2024 he was named a Windham-
Campbell Prize recipient. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Alice Austen

Alice Austen won the John Cassavetes Award for her debut film Give Me Liberty (writer/producer). She is a past resident of the Royal Court Theatre and her internationally produced plays include Animal Farm (Steppenwolf Theatre), Water, Cherry Orchard Massacre, and Girls in the Boat. She studied creative writing under Seamus Heaney at Harvard, where she received her JD, after which she moved to Brussels and lived on Place Brugmann. Her latest book is the novel 33 Place Brugmann. Austen currently lives in Milwaukee and is working on a new film.

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.

Stacey Balkun

Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter and coeditor of Fiolet & Wing. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Pleiades, and several other anthologies and journals. She holds a PhD from the University of Mississippi and an MFA from Fresno State. She lives in New Orleans and teaches online at The Poetry Barn.

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.”

Kendall Dunkelberg

Kendall Dunkelberg directs the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program and the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium at Mississippi University for Women. He is editor of Poetry South and has published three collections of poetry, Barrier Island Suite, Time Capsules, and Landscapes and Architectures, as well as the textbook A Writer’s Craft: Multi-Genre Creative Writing. His fourth poetry collection, Tree Fall with Birdsong, will be published by Fernwood Press in May. His poems have recently appeared in Tar River Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, Juke Joint, River Mouth Review, Peauxdunque Review, and Salvation South, and he has poems in Southern Voices: The Power of Place and Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology.

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.

Alyson (“Al”) Favilla

Alyson (“Al”) Favilla is an MFA student and a Grisham Fellow in poetry at the University of Mississippi. They have been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Diode, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, and, most recently, Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology.

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.

Ann Fisher-Wirth

Ann Fisher-Wirth’s eighth book is Into the Chalice of Your Thoughts, a poetry/photography collaboration with Wilfried Raussert, with facing-page translations into Spanish by the Women in Translation group. Her seventh book is Paradise Is Jagged and her fifth, a poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay, is Mississippi. With Laura-Gray Street, Fisher-Wirth coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology and the recently published Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology. A senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, Fisher-Wirth has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden, and residencies at Djerassi, Hedgebrook, Storyknife, and elsewhere. She will go to Turkey to lecture on American ecopoetry as a Fulbright Specialist in April 2025. Her awards and prizes include three poetry fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for poetry, and the 2023 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission. Fisher-Wirth retired in 2022 from the University of Mississippi, where she taught and directed the environmental studies program.

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.

Maggie Graber

Maggie Graber is the author of Swan Hammer, winner of the 2021 Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize and a 2023 nominee for a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. She has received fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission and the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, and she lives and teaches in Oxford, Mississippi, where she earned her PhD.

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.

William Joyce

William Joyce does animated films (Toy Story, Meet the Robinsons), but children’s books are his true bailiwick. His books include The Guardians of Childhood series of novels and picture books, Dinosaur Bob and His Adventures with the Family Lazardo, George Shrinks, and Rolie Polie Olie, which became an Emmy Award–winning animated television series on Disney+. His New York Times–bestselling The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore was named one of the one hundred best picture books of all time by Time magazine, and his animated film based on the book won an Academy Award in 2012. He lives in Shreveport, Louisiana. Rocket Puppies is his newest and happiest book.

Julia Kolchinsky

Julia Kolchinsky (formerly Dasbach) emigrated from Dnipro, Ukraine, as when she was six years old. She is the author the poetry collections The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, and 40 WEEKS. Her fourth poetry collection, Parallax, was just published in March by the Arkansas University Press. Her writing has appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. She is assistant professor of English and creative writing at Denison University.

Preston Lauterbach

Preston Lauterbach is author of the American music classic The Chitlin’ Circuit, as well as Beale Street Dynasty and Bluff City. His latest, Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King, was published in January of 2025. Lauterbach has coauthored three memoirs with significant figures in Black music, including Brother Robert with the stepsister of bluesman Robert Johnson; Timekeeper, with Memphis soul drummer Howard Grimes; and the Blind Boys of Alabama biography Spirit of the Century. His works have earned book of the year recognition from the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Rolling Stone.

Rachel Lyon

Rachel Lyon is the author of Self-Portrait with Boy, a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s 2018 First Novel Prize, and Fruit of the Dead, an Oprah Magazine best book of 2024 and which The New York Times called “superb” and “refreshing.” Lyon’s short stories have appeared in One Story, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, and other publications. She has taught creative writing most recently at Bennington College and at the American University of Paris, where she was the 2024 Paris Writer in Residence. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, she lives with her family in Western Massachusetts.

Bernice L. McFadden

Bernice L. McFadden is an assistant professor of creative writing at Tulane University and the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Sugar, The Warmest December, Loving Donovan, Nowhere Is a Place, Glorious, Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012), The Book of Harlan (winner of a 2017 American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction), and Praise Song for the Butterflies (longlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction). She is a five-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of three awards from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. A memoir of many threads, Firstborn Girls, her latest book, is an extraordinarily moving portrait of a life shaped by family, history, and the drive to be something more.

Michael McFee

Michael McFee is the author or editor of seventeen books, most recently A Long Time to Be Gone: Poems and Appointed Rounds: Essays. A native of Asheville, North Carolina, he taught in the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1990 to 2024.

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.

Rose McLarney

Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Colorfast, Forage, Its Day Being Gone, and The Always Broken Plates of Mountains. She is coeditor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia and the journal Southern Humanities Review. She has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, has served as Dartmouth poet- in-residence at the Frost Place, and is winner of the National Poetry Series, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry, among other prizes. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and the Oxford American. She is currently the Lanier Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University.

Philip Metres

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including his latest, Fugitive/Refuge. His other works include Shrapnel Maps, The Sound of Listening, Pictures at an Exhibition, the translation I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky, and Sand Opera. His work has garnered fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as six Ohio Arts Council grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Lyric Poetry Award, the Alice James Award, the Creative Workforce Fellowship, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University.

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.

James Ponti

James Ponti is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of four middle-grade book series, including City Spies and The Sherlock Society. His novels have been named to forty-five state award lists, optioned by Hollywood, and translated into fifteen languages. He’s a two-time Edgar Award–nominee, winning in 2018 for Vanished. He lives with his family in Orlando, Florida.

Jamie Quatro

Jamie Quatro is The New York Times notable author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for The Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, Literary Hub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement. Quatro’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Ploughshares. Her latest book Two-Step Devil, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and this year’s winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing in the fiction category. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo and teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. She lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Lilliam Rivera

Lilliam Rivera is a MacDowell Fellow and author of eight works of fiction: four young-adult novels, three middle-grade books, and a graphic novel for DC Comics. Her books have been awarded a Pura Belpré honor and featured on NPR and in The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and multiple “best of” lists. Her novel Never Look Back is slated for a movie adaptation. A Bronx, New York, native, Lilliam Rivera currently lives in Los Angeles.

Michael Rowlett

Michael Rowlett is associate professor of clarinet and music literature at the University of Mississippi, where he has taught since 2002. His recent appearances have included invited recitals in Vancouver, British Columbia; Nashville, Tennessee; at the inaugural American Single Reed Summit at Truman State University; and a performance of William Bolcom’s Clarinet Concerto at the University of North Carolina. He has appeared regularly with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. His CD, Close to Home, features the music of a diverse group contemporary American composers. He holds a Doctor of Music degree in clarinet performance from Florida State University and degrees from the University of Iowa and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His teachers include Frank Kowalsky, Maurita Murphy Mead, Freddy Arteel, and Donald Oehler.

Noah Saterstrom

Noah Saterstrom was raised in Mississippi and educated in the University of Mississippi’s Department of Art (BFA) and at Scotland’s Glasgow School of Art. His paintings and drawings are in public and private collections worldwide. They have recently been exhibited at Carol Robinson Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana; Fischer Galleries in Ridgeland, Mississippi; and Julia Martin Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee, among other venues in North Carolina, New York, Washington, and Arizona. Saterstrom has held residencies at HRH Prince Charles’s Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, Scotland; Morris and Spottiswood in Glasgow, Scotland; the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia; and Exploded View Microcinema in Tucson, Arizona. Saterstrom’s work has been covered in The Wall Street Journal, and he was formerly a regular contributor to Nashville Arts Magazine. His painting Maeve is the cover of Ann Patchett’s book The Dutch House. Another work, Road to Shubuta, was included in the Mississippi Museum of Art’s 2018 exhibition Picturing Mississippi and later acquired by the Museum. His work What Became of Dr. Smith, an immersive narrative painting of 183 canvases, exhibited at the Mississippi Museum of Art from April to September 2024. He lives in Nashville with his wife and three kids.

Leona Sevick

Leona Sevick’s work appears in Orion, The Southern Review, The Sun, and Poetry Northwest. Sevick serves on the advisory boards of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is provost and professor of English at Bridgewater College in
Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature. Her second collection of poems, The Bamboo Wife, was published by Trio House Press in 2024.

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.

Sheila Sundar

Sheila Sundar is the author of the novel Habitations. Her writing has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Threepenny Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi.

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.

Natasha Trethewey

Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012–2014), while also serving as the Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi (2012–2016). She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir; a book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and five collections of poetry: Monument: Poems New & Selected, which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall; Native Guard, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia; and Domestic Work, which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. She is also the editor of The Essential Muriel Rukeyser, Best New Poets 2007: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers, and Best American Poetry 2017. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. From 2015 to 2016 she served as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities, and in 2020, she received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from the Library of Congress. A member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 2019. At Northwestern University she is Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Boyce Upholt

Boyce Upholt is a writer and nature critic whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic, the Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He is the winner of a James Beard Award for investigative journalism, and he lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Upholt is this year’s winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing in the nonfiction category for The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi. The Great River is his first book.

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and Beast Meridian, which was a 2019 Whiting Award winner, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, and the winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. She was a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and holds a doctorate in English literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she lives with her son.

Elijah Wald

Elijah Wald is a musician and author of more than a dozen books, including Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of Popular Music, and the bestselling Dylan Goes Electric! His latest book, Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs & Hidden Histories, is a journey through the censored world of early blues and jazz, with Jelly Roll Morton as a guide. He has a PhD in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics and a Grammy for production and liner notes. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Cecil Price Walden

Cecil Price Walden writes music “of powerful emotional intensity and passion . . . that is almost impossibly gorgeous.”—Journal of Singing. Named a “Hero of the New South” by Southern Living magazine, Walden draws on the rich musical, literary, and culinary legacies of place to create work that is both familiar and new

Monica Lee Weatherly

Monica Lee Weatherly is a poet, writer, and professor of English at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College. She is the 2023 winner of Georgia Author of the Year for her chapbook of poetryIt Felt Like Mississippi, a 2023 Key West Literary Seminar Fellowship recipient, and the 2021 winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing for poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Tulane Review, Plainsongs, Nzuri Journal, Merge Literary Magazine, Obsidian, South Florida Poetry Journal, and Auburn Avenue. Her writing often focuses on the culture and experiences of people of color in the American South.

Zach Williams

Zach Williams is a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University, where he previously held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. His story “Trial Run,” published in The Paris Review, was one of three winners of 2023 ASME Awards for Fiction. Originally from Wilmington, Delaware, he currently resides with his family in San Francisco. His first collection of short stories, Beautiful Days, was one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2024.