Marion Barnwell was assistant professor of English at Delta State University for 25 years. She has published two books, A Place Called Mississippi and Touring Literary Mississippi, and numerous articles and short fiction. For the past three years, she has co-led a writing club at Rowan Middle School in Jackson.

Richard Boada is the author of three collections of poetry: The Error of Nostalgia (Texas Review Press 2013), nominated for the 2014 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award; Victory Tattoo (San Gabriel Valley Press), winner of the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Press Chapbook Prize; and Archipelago Sinking (Finishing Line Press 2011). He is a graduate of the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Louisville, and Bellarmine University, and is currently an assistant professor of English at William Carey University in Hattiesburg, MS.

William Boyle is from Brooklyn, NY. He’s the author of the novel GRAVESEND, which was recently translated into French and published by François Guérif as #1,000 in the Rivages/Noir collection. GRAVESEND has been shortlisted, with 4 other novels, for the Prix Polar SNCF 2016, one of the major literary awards in crime fiction, delivered by the French railways national company. It was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, as well. Boyle is also the author of a book of short stories, DEATH DON'T HAVE NO MERCY. He currently lives in Oxford, MS.

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Sarah C. Campbell creates picture books with facts and photographs. Her award-winning books, Mysterious Patterns: Finding Fractals in Nature, Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature, and Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator, are favorites on nonfiction shelves. She serves as the assistant regional adviser for the Louisiana/Mississippi Chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Sarah and her husband, Richard, who is co-photographer on the books, live in Jackson, MS.

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Mississippi-born Jennifer V. Cole is a writer and editor based in Birmingham, Alabama. Most recently she was Deputy Editor of Southern Living, where she covered the South for nearly a decade. Her work also appears in Garden & Gun, Fast Company, Coastal Living, Travel + Leisure, The Local Palate, Esquire, Punch, Modern Farmer, and more. Cole launched and edits Bake From Scratch, a luxury consumer publication dedicated to the world of bread, pastry, and confections. It was named the Hottest New Magazine by min in 2016, among 217 contenders. After graduating with honors from Auburn University with a triple major in Economics, French, and German, she made her way to New York where she worked at TIME magazine, and subsequently as an editor for Travel + Leisure. She has climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, ridden elephant-back through the jungles of Thailand, and sailed on gulets over the Aegean Sea. She’s generally made it her mission to eat her way around the world, and she’ll try anything once. Cole was the founding editor and producer of the Southern Living "Biscuits & Jam" video and concert music series. She has been named an Arkansas Traveler by the Governor and Secretary of State of Arkansas and received a proclamation from the Tennessee legislature for her work in food and music. She regularly speaks at conferences and events such as Terra Vita, BevCon, Food Media South, Atlanta Food & Wine Festival, and the Southern Food Writing Conference. Her work has been recognized by min, Folio, and the Society of American Travel Writers. She is a biscuit-loving member of the Southern Foodways Alliance and sits on the junior board for Jones Valley Teaching Farm in Birmingham. Cole speaks French, German, and Italian—and enough Dutch to get in trouble.

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Before becoming a freelance writer, Nancy Dorman-Hickson was an editor with Time Inc.’s Progressive Farmer and Southern Living magazines where she earned praise from Harper Lee, Pat Conroy, Naomi Judd and Anne Rice. She co-authored a bestselling memoir, Diplomacy and Diamonds, with Joanne King Herring, portrayed by Julia Roberts in Charlie Wilson’s War. She was a top five finalist for the National Magazine Award and wrote a documentary script that received the Videographer Award of Distinction. She’s served as a newspaper editor, a college instructor, and a public relations professional. She’s the wife of a professor and mother of twin son and daughter, both graduating from college this spring. A Starkville, Mississippi native, she’s lived in Birmingham for more than two decades.

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W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past and The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South. His essays and criticism have appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, WIRED, The Oxford American, and the New Yorker. He has just completed a year as the Eudora Welty Visiting Scholar in Southern Studies at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.

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Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. 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 a book of nonfiction, Great with Child, all with W. W. Norton. The Tilted World, a novel she co-authored with her husband, Tom Franklin, was published by HarperCollins. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs will be published by Norton in fall ‘17. Fennelly and Franklin live in Oxford with their three children.

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Ellen Ann Fentress is a writer, filmmaker, and teacher. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Oxford American, as well as on public radio. Her film Eyes on Mississippi examines the state's civil-rights timeline through the experience of outspoken journalist Bill Minor. With two partners, she founded Rowan Writes, a girls' writing club at Rowan Middle School in 2013. She is an MFA graduate of Bennington College.

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Novelist Matthew Guinn is the author of The Resurrectionist and The Scribe. He lives in Ridgeland with his wife Kristen and their children, Braiden and Phoebe.

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A broidered strap of beautiful Lydian work covered her feet.
Her shining ankles clad in fairest fashion
In broidered leather from the realm of Lydia,
So came the Goddess...

Linda Williams Jackson is the author of Midnight Without a Moon, a historical young adult novel set in 1955 Mississippi. A native of Rosedale, Mississippi, Linda now makes her home in Southaven with her husband and three children.

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Deborah Johnson was born below the Mason-Dixon Line, in Missouri, but grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. After college, she lived in San Francisco and then for many years in Rome, Italy, where she worked as a translator and editor of doctoral theses and at Vatican Radio. Deborah Johnson is the author of The Air Between Us, which received the Mississippi Library Association Award for fiction. She now lives in Columbus, Mississippi, and is working on her next novel.

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Rheta Grimsley Johnson is a columnist with King Features Syndicate of New York, and the author of The Dogs Buried Over the Bridge, Good Grief, The Story of Charles M. Schulz, and others.

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Cynthia Jones is a college student, community volunteer, and published author who was born and raised in Jackson, MS.

James Kimbrell has published three volumes of poetry, The Gatehouse Heaven (1998), My Psychic (2006), and Smote (2015), and was co-translator of Three Poets of Modern Korea: Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-Seon, and Choi Young-Mi (2002). The recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and twice winner of an NEA Fellowship, his work has appeared in magazines such as Poetry, The Nation, The Cincinnati Review, and Ploughshares, and in annuals such as Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. He lives in Tallahassee, where he teaches in the English Department at Florida State University.

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Jamie Kornegay is a former independent bookseller for Square Books in Oxford and the co-founder of Turnrow Book Co. in Greenwood. He's the author of the novel Soil, published by Simon & Schuster in 2015.

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Kiese Laymon is a black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author of Long Division, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and the forthcoming memoir Heavy.

Ashton Lee was born and grew up in Natchez, MS, but is now living in Oxford. He got much fodder for his Southern fiction from his extended family. He has been published since 1993 with 12 novels released to date. A thirteenth will be published in the fall of 2017. His first New York contract was with Putnam for whom he wrote what is now called 'The Piggly Wiggly Series' about six wealthy Southern widows who try to keep their local Piggly Wiggly grocery store open by scheduling dances in the aisles (2006-2011). He is now under contract to Kensington Books in New York for the six-novel 'Cherry Cola Book Club' series about an idealistic, young NE MS librarian who has to fight to keep her job and library open in the face of opposition from three good ol' boy city councilmen. To do so, she creates a book club which attracts the most interesting and influential citizens of fictional Cherico, Mississippi. They soon become an alternative family for one another and raise the profile of the library, keeping the politicians at bay. Five of the six novels in the series have been released (2013-2016), with the sixth to be published in the fall of 2017.

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Philip L. Levin is president of the Gulf Coast Writers Association, edits their magazine, and has published 22 books and over 100 magazine articles.

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Husband, father, son, visual and performing artist, Joecephus Martin's world is colored brightly, and most in red, black and green. Growing up in Mississippi, a state with rich history, deep pain and great potential, Martin, a Jafrican (aka Jackson native), is a by-product of his environment. As the hip hop artist, skipp coon, he has used his trademark black empowerment lyrics to perform nationally and internationally. He has cultivated a loyal fan base. If he’s in a classroom, meeting with parents or council members, or on a stage, Martin has been learning and working to improve his community for the past 10 years and doesn’t foresee himself doing anything else.

Award-winning, Mississippi-based writer Joe Maxwell, 54, has covered politics and culture for numerous national publications including the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times Syndicate, The Washington Times, World magazine and Christianity Today magazine. In 2006, he founded LifeStory Publishing, primarily publishing regional histories and biographies. He is currently reinstating The Well Writers Guild. Originally founded in 2000, it is a teaching and writing nonprofit focused on discovering and developing young talented writers to place in media jobs. Maxwell’s career began in the late 1980s as a reporter for two suburban Chicago newspapers. In his early thirties he moved to Christianity Today magazine—the leading thought and news journal for top evangelical thinkers worldwide—where he was assistant news editor, writing extensively on politics, welfare reform, pro-life issues, race issues, environmental issues, education reform, and tax reform. He then became national editor for Marvin Olasky at World magazine. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Maxwell edited the Cambridge, Mass.-based re:generation quarterly magazine, which won the Utne Reader’s national top alternative magazine during Maxwell’s tenure. He has served as journalist in residence and adjunct professor of journalism at Belhaven University. Maxwell received a 2005 IPPY book award from the Independent Publisher Book Awards for one local history book. He became known regionally after writing two biographies: "Amidst the Fray", the story of Mr. W.D. Mounger and his Republican years; and "A Courageous Cause," the story of the first ten founding years of the modern Mississippi Republican Party as told through the voice of Wirt A. Yerger. "A Courageous Cause" was nominated for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters’ Non-Fiction Book of the Year. Maxwell has also written, edited or published—among others books—"Camp DeSoto: A History"; "The Enduring Community; Pressing Toward the Goal: A History of Reformed University Ministries"; "Twister" (a children’s book); "An Obscure Doctor’s Journal"; and "A Sister’s Love: The History of the Dominican Sisters of St. Dominic’s."

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Margaret McMullan is the author of seven award-winning novels, the story collection Aftermath Lounge, and editor of the anthology, Every Father’s Daughter. Her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Southern Accents, The Millions, Teachers & Writers Magazine, StorySouth, National Geographic for Kids, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Glamour, and The Sun, among other journals and anthologies. Margaret received an NEA fellowship and a Fulbright to research and teach in Hungary for a new memoir, Where the Angels Lived: One Family’s Story of Exile, Loss, and Return. She taught at the University of Evansville for 25 years, serving as English Department chair. She was formerly the Melvin Peterson Endowed Chair in Literature and Creative Writing until she retired in 2015 to write full time. She currently lives in Pass Christian, Mississippi, with her husband Pat O’Connor, a filmmaker, and their dog Samantha.

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Mary Miller grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of two collections of short stories, Big World (Short Flight/Long Drive Books, 2009), and Always Happy Hour (Liveright/Norton, 2017), as well as a novel, The Last Days of California (Liveright/Norton, 2014). Her stories have appeared in the Oxford American, New Stories from the South, McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review, and many others. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction at the University of Texas and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss. She currently lives on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and is on faculty at the low-residency MFA program at Mississippi University for Women.

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A native of Mississippi, Benjamin Morris is the author of Coronary (Fitzgerald Letterpress, 2011) and Hattiesburg, Mississippi: A History of the Hub City (History Press, 2014). A member of the Mississippi Artist Roster, he has received a Pushcart nomination, a poetry fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission, and a residency from A Studio in the Woods in New Orleans, where he lives.

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Mary Ann O'Gorman has lived on the Gulf Coast for 25 years, where she's taught high school and college English. Her chapbook of poems, "Life in This House," was published in 2008. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Sewanee School of Letters (2012). In 2016, she was the writer-in-residence at 12 Oaks in Ocean Springs. She also teaches yoga and volunteers at the VA and the local domestic violence shelter.

Andrew Paul's recent nonfiction is featured with Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, The A.V. Club, VICE Media, Hazlitt, and Tablet. He also has fiction included on McSweeney's Internet Tendency and Pseudopod, as well as the anthologies "Thuglit: Last Writes" and "Mississippi Noir." He lives in New Orleans.

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Michael Pickard teaches English and Creative Writing at Millsaps College.

Richelle Putnam is a Mississippi Arts Commission (MAC) Teaching Artist/Roster Artist (Literary), a Mississippi Humanities Speaker, and a 2014 MAC Literary Arts Fellow. She writes for Mississippi Magazine, Town & Gown Magazine, Eat. Drink. MISSISSIPPI, Parents & Kids Magazine and more. Her YA biography, The Inspiring Life of Eudora Welty (The History Press, April 2014), received the 2014 Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards Silver Medal. She is also the author of Lauderdale County, Mississippi; a Brief History (The History Press, 2011) and co-author of Legendary Locals of Meridian, Mississippi (Arcadia Publishing 2013). Her mission as a writer and teaching artist is to help children see the beauty of words and to realize their power.

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Treasure Shields Redmond is a St. Louis metro-area based poet, speaker, diversity and inclusion coach, and social justice educator. Her book CHOP focuses on the life of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer. Even though Treasure is completing a PhD in English Literature and Criticism, is a published writer, gifted veteran educator, and has spoken on stages all over the U.S. and in Europe, she uses her humble beginnings in the federal housing projects in Meridian, Mississippi to fuel her passion for helping college-bound students write extraordinary college entrance essays and offering perceptive leaders trustworthy diversity and inclusion facilitation.

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Harriet Riley is a free-lance writer focusing on creative nonfiction. She publishes primarily short nonfiction pieces in magazines and on-line publications. Harriet is in her ninth year with Writers in the Schools in Houston, Texas, and is honored to teach in a variety of settings with WITS. She also teaches an adult creative writing class through the Spring Branch Community Education program and has recently led writing workshops in North Carolina and Georgia. Before moving to Houston in 2007, Harriet taught undergraduate writing classes at the University of West Florida in Pensacola. She has also worked as a non-profit director, hospital marketing director, and newspaper reporter. She has her MA in print journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and her BA in English and journalism from the University of Mississippi.

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Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She attended Mount Holyoke College and received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835, and the novels The Story of Land and Sea and Free Men. Her writing has also appeared in The Oxford American, Granta, Literary Hub, Garden & Gun, and Lenny. She lives in New Orleans.

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Matthew Clark Smith, a graduate of Jackson Public Schools, has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and now lives in Jackson again. He is the author of two picture books for children -- Small Wonders: Jean-Henri Fabre and His World of Insects, and Lighter than Air: Sophie Blanchard, the First Woman Pilot -- as well as various essays for adults.

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Michael Farris Smith is the award-winning author of Desperation Road, Rivers, and The Hands of Strangers. Rivers was named in numerous Best Books of the Year lists, and garnered the Mississippi Author Award for Fiction. His short fiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his essays have appeared with The New York Times, Catfish Alley, Writer's Bone, and more. He lives in Columbus, Mississippi, with his wife and daughters.

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Neely Tucker is a seventh-generation Mississippian, journalist, novelist, and foreign correspondent who has worked in 60+ countries/territories. He has spent the past 16 years at The Washington Post.

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Tiffany Quay Tyson’s debut novel THREE RIVERS was a finalist for both the Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction. Her second novel is forthcoming in Spring of 2018 from Arcade/Skyhorse. Her short fiction has been published in The Tulane Review and Peeks & Valleys: A Southern Journal. Tiffany was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is a graduate of Delta State University. After college she worked for a brief stint as a newspaper reporter in the Mississippi Delta, where she received the Frank Allen Award for Journalism. She is the recipient of two Heartland Emmy Awards including one for writing for a children’s public television program. She is a faculty member at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the Lighthouse Young Writers Program. She lives in Denver.

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Curtis Wilkie has been a newspaper reporter for nearly four decades, spending most of his career with the Boston Globe. Since retiring from that job, he's served as a member of the Ole Miss journalism faculty since 2002.

Gerry Wilson published a short story collection in 2015—Crosscurrents and Other Stories—with Press 53. A retired English and Creative Writing teacher at the secondary level, she also taught adult writing workshops in the Community Enrichment program at Millsaps College.

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