Subscribe now

Where are you from?

I’m from all over. My father spent three years in the South Pacific during World War II; afterward, he stayed in the Army. I was born in Washington, D. C. Two months later, he was stationed in Wetzlar, Germany, where we joined him when I became old enough to travel. After three years in Germany, we moved to Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, where I lived for the next five years. My father was sent to Seoul during the Korean War, and in 1955 we joined him at Camp Zama, Japan. In 1957 he retired. We moved to Berkeley, California, where I lived until I went to college in Claremont, California. Immediately after graduating, I married my first husband, John Fisher, and we moved to Liège, Belgium, where we taught at a tiny International School. Three years later we returned to Claremont, where we got our doctoral degrees. In 1981 we moved with our three small children to Charlottesville, where I became an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia. We divorced after a year, and I married Peter Wirth. In 1988, Oxford became our home—though during our decades here, we lived in Switzerland and Sweden for an academic year each, where I taught on Fulbright awards at the University of Fribourg and Uppsala University.

When did you move to Mississippi and why did you move here?

Peter and I came to the University of Mississippi to teach in the English department in 1988. Ray Mabus had recently been elected Governor, and he allocated “excellence” money to build up certain university departments around the state and strengthen higher education. One of these was the UM English department. Greg Schirmer, then the department Chair, was able to hire a dozen people over three years—and we were among them. Peter retired in 2020, during the pandemic, and I retired in 2022.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

Moving around so much throughout my life, I’ve developed a flexible definition of home. Home is pretty much wherever I find myself. And it is where there are people I love—especially Peter, now that our children are grown and scattered.

We’ve lived in Oxford for nearly thirty-eight years now, in the house we bought from Richard and Lisa Howorth, who own Square Books. It’s an old house with high ceilings, beaded board walls, and heart pine floors. It has neither central heat nor central air conditioning, and none of the doorknobs work the way doorknobs should. I absolutely love it. Pots of flowers line the walk from the driveway to the front porch and fill the screened back porch. In the early mornings, prismatic crystals that one of my daughters gave me and that I tied to the ceiling fan chains shimmer and make rainbows on the bedroom walls. So, I realize, home is something that one makes. For me it involves creating color and warmth and beauty and good food, and filling the house not with sleek accoutrements but with objects that carry memories and stories—like my mother’s paintings, Peter’s alphabetized bookshelves, pictures of our families, the Mexican pottery Tree of Life and black clay Oaxacan animals that line the mantel in the bricked-up bedroom fireplace. I’m sitting on the bed, looking at them now, in this room that one of my sons painted the lush, subtle colors of a daffodil.

Order Attached to the Living World

What do you miss most about the place where you’re from?

Since I lived in so many places, I will choose Berkeley as the “place where [I’m] from.” I lived there from 1957 until I started college in 1964. My mother stayed until 1996, and by then my daughters were living there. One still is, with her husband and two teenagers, so I have gone back often.

I love visiting Berkeley, but I don’t miss it as it is now, except for the flowers that grow in people’s yards all twelve months of the year, the doughnuts at Dream Fluff, and the food at Baker and Commons. It’s too expensive and too crowded; everything requires a car trip, whereas here in Oxford I can walk to the grocery store, the woods, the university, the restaurants, the bookstore. But I miss Berkeley as it was in the early 1960’s, during my high school years. I had some amazing experiences—like seeing Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and other performers in concert for free at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival in the Greek Theater at Cal; or seeing T. S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral performed at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco; or hanging out on Telegraph Avenue in cafés; or going down to San Pablo Street to see the Chambers Brothers with my friend Susie; or watching the sun rise with my date after prom, sitting on a hillside in Tilden Park that gave a view of the city, the Bay Bridge, way over there the Golden Gate, and all of San Francisco Bay. Berkeley shaped me. That’s where I lived by the ocean, that’s where I received my political education, that’s where I learned about the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, that’s where I first saw foreign films and read serious literature, that’s where I had my first long-term boyfriend, that’s where my father died, that’s where I first knew sorrow. I will always feel lucky that I had those years.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

This has changed over the nearly thirty-eight years that we have lived here. When we moved here, our younger son was just four and the children by our first marriages, who came and went between California (mine), Connecticut (Peter’s), and Oxford, were in middle school and high school. Like many parents with school-age children, our friends were the parents of our children’s friends, and the community we started to build had to do with them. Teaching thousands of students over the decades and taking part in the life of the English department also gave us shifting and vibrant communities; we were close to several people who have moved or died, and our best friends here are current or retired members of the department. In the early 2000’s, our MFA program began; over the years, I taught many seminars and workshops and hosted many visiting poets. In 2006, I began directing and teaching in the brand-new Interdisciplinary Minor in Environmental Studies; this created whole new communities, expanding my knowledge of and contacts with environmental farmers, scientists, activists, working in north Mississippi. From about 2009 to 2020, I taught at Southern Star Yoga Studio in Oxford; I stopped teaching yoga during the pandemic, but for those years it was a great joy to me. And in 2003 my first book of poems, Blue Window, was published. Square Books, which has always been at the center of our Oxford lives, gave me a launch, as it has done with all my books since then.

For three semesters in recent years, I taught as part of the Prison to College Pipeline program at Parchman, the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Now, as Poet Laureate, I am continuing that work for Units 25 and 30, starting this spring. And I’ve just completed my first year of the Mississippi Poetry Project created by my predecessor Katie Pierce, in which K-12 students participate in writing poems to a prompt, winning poems at the class level are sent to me, further judging takes place, eventually all the poems I receive are made into an anthology, and the students are celebrated at the Mississippi Book Festival. This year we received over 350 poems! The anthology is at the printer’s and will soon be ready to send to the schools.

I look forward to finding other ways to build and celebrate community over the next few years. Peter and I will be traveling in connection with my laureateship during the next few months. I welcome the chance to work with anyone who invites me.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

First let me turn this question around and tell you the weirdest assumption a Mississippian made about someone who’s not from here. After our Fulbright year in Sweden, I went into a store here to buy some Birkenstocks where I’d bought them often before. “Oh we don’t carry them any longer. Nobody wears them,” the salesman said. “Sure they do,” I replied. “I was just in Sweden and everybody I saw had on Birkenstocks.” “Well, that’s because they have to walk all the time,” he said. “After all, they don’t have them cars.”

The weirdest—or most ignorant—assumption I’ve encountered about Mississippi is that everyone thinks alike and that I am to be pitied for living here.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

This is not easy to answer, because it presupposes that I’d know what I would be like if I did not live in Mississippi. But here are some thoughts:

First, though I wrote my dissertation, which became my academic book, on the poet William Carlos Williams, when I taught at the University of Virginia, I found that they had little to offer in women’s studies, so I focused mainly on women writers and psychoanalytic feminist theory. Then, when I came to the University of Mississippi, I expected to continue in that vein; I was writing a monograph on the novelist Willa Cather. But once I got tenure and sat in on a poetry workshop that Aleda Shirley was teaching, I drank the Kool-Aid and vowed to write poetry from then on. To my great good fortune, the English department kept allowing me to change directions and teach what I wanted to teach. So, I became part of the MFA faculty in poetry, then took the lead in developing our Environmental Studies program, continued teaching in the Honors College, and began to teach at Parchman. Many other universities would not have permitted this flexibility. But this permission to keep recreating myself, to keep feeling that I had something new to offer, helped me remain interested in teaching way past retirement age.

Living in Mississippi has been an invaluable political education. In the early 1960s, as a high school student in Berkeley, I began to become aware of ongoing issues of social and racial justice, and US foreign policy. But Mississippi has brought these issues much closer to my daily experience. Especially, teaching at Parchman has opened my eyes and heart regarding many things involving race, poverty, lack of educational opportunities, lack of social services, lack of social justice. I know that Mississippi is not alone in facing deep-seated problems, but this is where I am.

I’ve become much more comfortable talking to people than I used to be as a Northerner. I used to suffer sometimes from nearly paralyzing social anxiety. Now, I can chat away with just about anyone.

I’ve become enamored of the South’s natural beauty, and, in summer, the fireflies and the cicadas and crickets that trill and chirr all night.

When we moved to Mississippi in 1988, we had several other choices. But Mississippi felt real, not hyper-developed (which has changed), not hyper-homogeneous, and we thought we could make a difference. I believe we have, and I’m glad we came.

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

In the 1960s, as a teenager in Berkeley following the Civil Rights movement on TV and begging my mother to let me come South on the bus for Freedom Summer, I vowed that the two places I would never live were Alabama and Mississippi. Happily, Mississippi has not lived up to that past expectation. What I’ve learned about Mississippi from living here is that it has an incredibly rich cultural history, oral, musical, artistic, and written; many ardent and brilliant people working to improve things like social and racial justice, education, and health care; great natural beauty; wonderful food; huge problems; and huge promise.

Order Paradise is Jagged

Have you ever thought about moving away? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?

Sometimes I’ve talked about moving away, especially in what can be brutal summer weather, but Peter once said something that has stayed with me: “I don’t want to be an old person in a place where I haven’t built a community.” It’s not a sense of duty that keeps me rooted here, but rather, a knowledge that I have work that I love, people whom I love, a house that I love. As long as I can keep traveling, I’m happy to stay in Oxford.

My “tipping point” would not involve just moving away from Mississippi, but—at this point in our country’s dismal history—leaving the United States altogether.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

I have often told people from outside Mississippi that everything one can say about it is true. I wish people understood this. I also wish that if they think that the rest of the United States is better than Mississippi, they would get off their high horses and realize they are projecting; all parts of this country contain injustice, poverty, ugliness, environmental damage, racism, ignorance, violence—and all parts of this country contain people fighting against injustice, poverty, environmental damage, ugliness, racism, ignorance, and violence. Just like Mississippi. There are beauty, compassion, intelligence, and kindness everywhere.

Is there a Mississippi change-maker who you think everyone needs to know about?

Betsy Chapman is the change-maker I’ll celebrate. She runs the Oxford Community Market, which is one of our farmers markets, but she also does so much more. She works with local farmers to organize food drives, and with people in housing projects to plant and care for gardens. During and after the ice storm, she created a group called Second Responders, which collected food, clothing, and hygienic supplies to be distributed at some of the little towns around here that were hit hardest, as well as to people in Oxford. She is one of the most energetic and passionate people I know, utterly devoted to combatting need and bringing people together.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

If I had a billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, I’d use it to protect and restore the natural environment, which has been so severely damaged, and to help create and promote organic farming. I don’t know how I’d do it, but that would be my goal.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

I have been waiting on pins and needles to announce this news: my ninth book, For What Is, Praise: New and Selected Poems, has just been accepted for the Silver Concho Series, an imprint of Press 53, and will be published by the end of 2026. I am so psyched!!! Also, Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology is a finalist for this year’s IBPA Poetry Award! The event is May 15, in Portland, Oregon, which is where our son Caleb lives, so I’m going!

Ann Fisher-Wirth is Mississippi Poet Laureate 2025-2029. She is the author of nine books of poems; her ninth, For What Is, Praise: New and Selected Poems, will be published in the Silver Concho Series of Press 53 by the end of 2026. Her seventh book of poems is Paradise Is Jagged (Terrapin Books, 2023), and her fifth, a poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay, is Mississippi (Wings Press, 2018). With Laura-Gray Street, she coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013) and Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2025). A senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, she has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden, and residencies at Djerassi, Hedgebrook, The Mesa Refuge, Camac, and Storyknife. She is the recipient of several awards and prizes, including three poetry fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize, a Rita Dove Poetry Prize, a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, and the 2023 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Literature and Poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission. Ann retired in 2022 from the University of Mississippi, where she taught in the MFA program and directed the Environmental Studies program for many years. Until recently, she also taught yoga at Southern Star in Oxford, MS.

Subscribe now

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Subscribe now

Where are you from?

I grew up moving between Memphis, Tennessee, and West Lafayette, Indiana. My family moved to Mississippi the year I started college at the University of Southern California. I lived in Oxford for three years while completing my undergraduate degree at the University of Mississippi. I lived and worked in Jackson for two years before moving to Washington state.

When did you move to Washington and why did you move there?

I moved in the summer of 2024. My motivations were threefold: adventure, proximity to whales’ migratory paths, and gender affirming care.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

At the age of twenty-eight I’ve lived in five states, nine cities/towns, and fourteen apartments/houses. Each place has held and nurtured various parts of me. Home feels so hard to define because some parts of me thrive while other parts decay in each place I’ve lived.

Maybe home is where I get to grow? Certainly home is where my two cats rest their heads. We three came into each other’s lives because we were in Oxford, Mississippi, at the right time.

Alongside being a great place to adopt pets, Mississippi is the home where I learned that seemingly contradictory parts of me can coexist. It’s where I came out as nonbinary. I guess I figured as a Jewish queer person covered in tattoos I’d be perceived as other in small town Mississippi no matter what so I might as well be all that I was.

It’s where I learned the power of community under a system that doesn’t seem to care much for your safety. It’s where, during a single hour on a game-day in Oxford, a group of drunk students formed a circle around me in the alley behind work as I took out the trash, calling me slurs, and a friend working in a coffee shop on the Square saw my devastated face after and asked for the full story. He told me I was loved.

In an English survey class at the University of Mississippi, we read “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman. I’d heard the line, “I contain multitudes” before. But Mississippi is where those words became simultaneous permission and call to action.

Mississippi, with all the parts that she’s got, is the home that taught me I can exist in fragments without being fractured. That no one ever truly reaches “grown.” We are always becoming.

What do you miss most about Mississippi?

I miss slow. Slow speech and service catching up with the lady selling stamps at the post office. Listening to Jonathan Richman with Ted O’Brien as I set aside the New York Times for subscribers pre- Sunday morning Square Books shift. Walking into Off-Square books and learning something new about astrology from Al Morse. Grabbing a chocolate cookie from Robbie at Jackson’s Sunflower Oven on my lunch break. I miss the space between happenings that begged me to take a moment and feel rather than rushing from excitement to excitement and away from myself.

How have you cultivated community in Washington? Do you still feel rooted to Mississippi?

I am still working to cultivate a community in Washington. Only recently has the Pacific Northwest truly started to feel like my home, rather than a detour on this multi-hyphenate and meandering life of mine. I needed to learn to lean in to spark this shift. To linger a little longer in conversations and questions.

Recreational spaces have opened me up.

Last summer I attended the Chuckanut Writer’s Conference. While in attendance, I wrote poems about food in a workshop taught by Western Washington professor, Jane Wong. Danced with the concept of duende and how it might partner with my writing about bipolar disorder. I made a friend who is now one of my go-to draft readers. Attending the conference helped fold me into the Bellingham writing community and envision how being here aligns with my writing goals.

I also started taking guitar lessons from a Bellingham lifer in February. As someone who once dreamed of performing music on a stage for a living but gave up because they hate stage-based visibility, learning to play an instrument is a hug sent back in time from twenty-eight to little me.

After nearly two years of living in Bellingham, I am beginning to see how gentle tendings to creative fixations I’ve carried in my pocket throughout life have sowed seeds of growth. The transition has not been smooth. I have worked hard to reap the benefits of a cross-country move. Friends who have kept in close contact from afar (and a really solid therapist who has a plethora of stuffed animals in her office) have helped too.

Since arriving in Washington, my main two circles have been my work and Jewish communities. This was also true in Mississippi. In Oxford, many Square Books coworkers became friends and remain family. While working at the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, housed in Jackson’s Beth Israel Congregation (BIC), my cohort was integral to my spiritual and social life. I would not be who I am without these communities and absolutely remain rooted in Mississippi.

The month of January highlighted my Mississippi roots tenfold when Beth Israel Congregation was set on fire by a white supremacist. While I only worked in that building for two years, I grew into adulthood at BIC. I was in that building when the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (JWHO) ruling came down and overturned Roe v. Wade. JWHO, or the Pink House, was down the street from my apartment in Jackson.

Considering Mississippi home can carry significant grief. It also carries the comfort of community who knows what it is to continue to fight, love, hope, and remember that joy persists while grieving.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been there?

When I went to the University of Southern California, a group of frat boys congratulated me on my ability to read.

What is something that you’ve come to understand about Mississippi by living elsewhere?

In California and Washington alike, I’ve encountered folks who sneer at all of Mississippi for what they consider to be “backwards” policies. In my experience, folks on the coast rarely take the time to consider that many Mississippi citizens are just as upset about their state’s infrastructure, if not more so, than folks witnessing it from elsewhere.

Many people congratulate me on “getting out” when I tell them I moved to Washington from Mississippi. This burns.

While I now live somewhere with premium healthcare access and a culture that generally supports my queer identity, I miss Mississippi all the time. I miss the friend who showed me what it looked like to be candid about our shared neurodivergence. The bookselling friend who still sends me books twice a year and reads everything I write. The queer community that held me after I came out. The patron who came to the Oxford square every Sunday to place a fresh copy of a MLK quote book on the Confederate Statue.

I miss banana pudding, watermelon, and hot wings.

Lord, do I miss hot wings.

It took me leaving to realize just how many people outside of the American South forget, or genuinely do not know, that Mississippi goes beyond what they see in the news. It’s all that and a million tiny moments of loving on the people around you and having them love on you back. Living in Washington has helped me understand just how protective of Mississippi I’ve become. I’ve got meaningful moments of loving here too but Mississippi love moments are sweeter cause loving in Mississippi tastes like resistance.

Have you ever thought about moving back? What would need to happen in order for you to move back to Mississippi?

I think about moving back every time a movie based in the South shows kudzu. Every time a work client says their name with a twang. Whenever I have cause to remember Washington doesn’t have fireflies. When Spring comes around and I’d sell my right hand for a piece of King Cake.

I doubt I’d come back unless gender affirming care and protections were secured socially and politically.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

I wish people who’ve never been to Mississippi, or the South at all, people whose perceptions are entirely grounded in the media, knew that folks are working with everything they’ve got to make Mississippi a safer place to live. To dismiss Mississippi citizens because their state underfunds education, demonizes queerness, and undermines racial equality is a bit like dismissing folks stuck in a burning building because you think that arson is bad. Many folks in Mississippi put their hearts and souls into bolstering their communities’ qualities of life and are consistently dismayed by the powers working against them. They also want to put the fire out but they’re fighting it from inside the house.

Is there a Mississippi change-maker or organization who you think everyone needs to know about?

I want to highlight Beth Israel Congregation and the Institute of Southern Jewish Life.

BIC was founded the year before the Civil Sar and is the oldest Jewish congregation in the state of Mississippi. It is now the only full-time synagogue in the state. In 1967, BIC was bombed by the KKK in response to Rabbi Perry Nussbaum’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. Nussbaum’s home was also bombed months later. The library was destroyed by the bombing in 1967 and again in January of 2026 when the building was set on fire by a white supremacist.

Beth Israel is the largest congregation in the state as well as the home of the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, an organization which began as the Museum of Southern Jewish Experience. The museum is now a separate entity based in New Orleans.

Founded in 2000, the ISJL provides educational, spiritual, and cultural resources to Jewish communities across the South of all shapes and sizes. During my time as a program associate in ISJL’s education department, I worked with Beth Israel as well as congregations in Texas and Virginia to create lesson plans, Torah studies, d’varim (sermons), and holiday programming. The ISJL’s work is integral to the survival of southern Judaism.

Beth Israel Congregation and the Institute of Southern Jewish Life are in the process of rebuilding following the destruction of their building. If you’re interested in donating to their rebuilding fund, you can find that here.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

I would invest this money in queer communal spaces and libraries across the state. The impact that a “third space” (space other than work or home) can have on a person’s quality of life is tremendous, particularly if work and home are hostile toward that person’s identity.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

My long-term project is an essay collection focused on the intersections of creativity, spirituality, and bipolar disorder. One such essay will soon be featured in The Page Gallery Journal’s chapbook “Fates.”

Additionally, I’ve been diving into pet portrait commissions! The world can be a hardening place, especially right now, and my cats always help me stay soft. A lot of my portraits are commissioned for folks who’ve just had a pet pass away. I know how sacred relationships with pets are and it’s an honor to create pieces that celebrate those bonds.

elz bulington is a queer, Jewish, neurodivergent twenty-something. elz is currently working on a book about the intersections of bipolar disorder, creativity, and spirituality. Their favorite Girl Scout Cookie is the thin-mint and they have a parasocial relationship with the number seven.

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Where are you from?

I’m from Jackson, Tennessee.

When did you move to Mississippi and how long were you here?

I moved from Jackson, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1995 to attend Tougaloo College. I graduated in 1999, and headed to Pennsylvania State University to earn my PhD. After that, I moved to St. Louis, Missouri in 2003, where I’ve resided since then.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

Home is a place where family and origin stories are, and whereas I’m from Tennessee, so many of my intellectual origin stories are rooted to Mississippi and my time at Tougaloo and in Jackson.

Home is also a place where you experience all kinds of formative experiences. My last year in Jackson, I started working for The Mississippi Link, a weekly African American newspaper. Between Tougaloo and that newspaper, I had a wealth of learning experiences.

What do you miss most about Mississippi?

The conversations. In my sophomore year at Tougaloo, I took a class on Richard Wright taught by my professor, the late great Jerry W. Ward, Jr. That course led to a conversation with Dr. Ward that persisted for almost three decades. Working as a reporter for The Mississippi Link gave me chances to converse with people all across the city of Jackson. I miss those conversations and others, which were linked to my time in Mississippi.

Do you still feel rooted to Mississippi?

For one, I knew that two vibrant thinkers—Wright and Ward—set me flowing, so I’ve tried to use books and big ideas to converse with others I’ve encountered along the way. I definitely feel connected to Mississippi in the sense that my engagement with intellectualism on local and international levels are rooted and routed to that moment I was at Tougaloo and moving around Jackson.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been there?

When I was in high school and living in Jackson, Tennessee, I went on a class trip to Louisiana. I had been to Mississippi many times growing up, because it’s the home of my father’s side of the family. On the way back from that high school trip, late at night, the bus broke down in Mississippi. I thought it was strange and hilarious that so many of my classmates were afraid because the bus broke down “in the South.” Many of my peers, all from Tennessee, somehow thought of Mississippi as the real South, and Tennessee as somehow the North by comparison.

How has being from Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

Well, a couple of things. I’ve stayed in touch to aspects of the South through the writings of C. Liegh McInnis. I’ve been actively following his newsletter and wild email missives since graduating from Tougaloo. (Whew, his militant-minded Thanksgiving Day critiques of Thanksgiving are hilarious, far out, and classics). There are too many elements to name concerning my writer-organizer identity that I’ve borrowed from C. Liegh. So that’s one. Of course, again, there’s the late Jerry W. Ward, Jr. He was the mentor and thinker that set me on this path of literary historian and Richard Wright scholar.

Order Writing Black Panther

What is something that you’ve come to understand about Mississippi by living elsewhere?

I’ll tell you the truth, I stayed troubled by some of the socioeconomic injustices and struggles with education in the state, and the fact that it just wasn’t talked about enough while I was there. For all kinds of legit reasons, some Black circles I belonged to were defensive when it came to acknowledging the large systemic problems in the state. Talking about the oppressive conditions in some ways would seem like Black people were helpless against white people, and then talking about agency too much and it would seem like Black people were responsible for all the problems they face. So it was and is difficult.

Either way, I sometimes get angry when I think about a lack of opportunities in Mississippi for generations of people. And saying I get angry is probably one version of really saying I’m hurt and frustrated about it all.

Have you ever thought about moving back? What would need to happen in order for you to move back to Mississippi?

It’s come up every now and then, when I tried to imagine what it would be like to teach at Tougaloo. The college would need to have some visionary leaders who made me think that they were really interested in taking the school to new places. Maybe something like that would need to be in place for Jackson as well when I think about what it would take for me to move back.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

I tell people all the time about how generous and supportive folks at Tougaloo and in Jackson were to me. I credit the college and city of Jackson for giving me this strong professional and intellectual base. I wish more people understood that the right sets of supportive people pouring their energy into somebody can really go a long way. I learned that in Mississippi.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about? Is there a Mississippi change-maker who you think everyone needs to know about?

Writer: Richard Wright, of course. Change-maker: C. Liegh McInnis.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

Major investments in creating educational pipelines and pathways for people. That means establishing or reinventing community spaces like libraries and transforming those places into hubs of humanities and arts, education, and technology training and participation. I’d want to support institutional structures that support intellectual growth, livelihood, and much further exploration for people. I’d invest quite a bit in gathering people to continually assess what we really need at this moment and all the moments and decades beyond.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

I’m excited about the upcoming release of my next book, Writing Black Panther: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Representation Struggles. I had a good time writing it, and I’m hoping it finds those folks who’ll have a good time reading it.

Howard Rambsy II is Distinguished Research Professor of Literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA, where he specializes in African American fiction, poetry, and comic books. He is the author of The Black Arts Enterprise (2011) Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers (2020). He is the creator of Remarkable Receptions, a podcast series on African American literature.

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Learn more

Where are you from?

I’m from the neighborhood where the bookstore is located. I grew up between here and Duling Hall.

Talk about what was it like to grow up here, grow up in this neighborhood.

Oh, gosh, I think it’s wonderful. You could bike everywhere. You could ride down Old Canton Road hill. You could bike to Duling, bike to Brent’s Drugs, write your girlfriend’s name or want-to-be girlfriend’s name on the post at Brent’s. And you could go buy your paperback books, James Bond books. Brent’s had a paperback spinner rack. I still have some of those books, too. They’re brown now. But they’re part of my special collection. It was a sweet time. And then The Brass Key was up there. The Brass Key was a real good little bookstore where you could find your Hardy Boys and Landmarks. It was a gift to the community.

Books have always had a special meaning for you.

I feel like it. I’m an only child and my father passed away right after I turned twelve. My mama went back to work and I think reading was a way for me to kind of find my own identity. I just always loved reading. Wasn’t very good in school. Didn’t do very good at reading what they wanted me to.

Did you consciously know you wanted to stay in Jackson, or did you ever think of moving away?

I don’t ever think I thought about staying here and I don’t think I ever thought about moving away. It just sort of happened. I found the idea of doing the bookstore. It worked long enough and good enough to keep me here.

I think people have a sense of home here at Lemuria. That’s the special thing an independent bookstore can bring to a community is to make it feel specific to a place and to make you feel like, at least for people who love books, that youknow where to find the other people that love books.

Well, that’s what your local bookstore is supposed to be. You’re supposed to love your community and love the books that come out of your community. Ms. Welty was a leader in that spirit. In her house that spirit is still there. She displayed the magnetism of community.

Did your own understanding of home influence your vision for the bookstore or even your desire to open a bookstore?

I guess you could say understanding. That’s an interesting idea. You know, they asked me this week, why did you open the bookstore? And the answer was, I couldn’t find books I wanted to read. Everywhere I went, came home with a bag, a grocery bag full of books. And that was kind of the beginning of the counterculture era in the middle of America. And I felt like that there had to be other people in Jackson that were looking for counterculture books, not necessarily what your bookstore in the mall offered. We used the Whole Earth Catalog and Ram Dass’ Be Here Now bibliography references, talked to friends, and put together an inventory with references on the occult and psychology, creative processes, art, and then literary.

Did meeting authors like Eudora Welty and Willie Morris shape your understanding of what the bookstore meant for the community?

I was waiting tables immediately after I opened the bookstore at Poets to keep it open. And Ms. Welty came there and I rudely intruded and told her that I had a bookstore behind her at Poets, which is where it was originally in The Quarter. And I told her, you know, you’re always welcome. And then when I moved to Highland Village she came in and we became friends. When Willie moved back to Mississippi, we got to be closer friends, around the time that The Courting of Marcus Dupree came out.

I think that what I learned from those two people and others, is not only is the bookstore trying to become friendly with its readers, you want to enjoy the new friendships that you build with writers—wanting to work on their books, caring about their books, realizing that it isn’t just a product, that the writers caring about their books in your store makes the books come alive.

Then Ms. Welty brought her friends, Willie brought his friends, like William Styron. And the bookstore becomes an extension of friendship. With the idea of writers caring about Square Books and Lemuria, and working together, we kind of created the I-55 tour. Richard Howorth and I would meet halfway at Stuckey’s and swap writers.

Did you encounter any assumptions or misconceptions about Mississippi by people who haven’t been here? I imagine you’ve had to reach out to a lot of people that have no idea or even no interest in coming to Mississippi.

You’ve got to remember even in the ‘80s there was still a Mississippi cloud—just the whole idea of the Mississippi had gotten so much bad press, most people thought it was everything. If you were from Mississippi, you kind of had to get through the door, was my way of looking at it. And I always found that exciting.

I like the idea that they don’t understand until they realize your genuineness. A genuineness not just of desire, but of knowing who you are. You’re not pretending to be a New York bookseller. You’re not scared to work. And you aren’t going to buy into what others want you to do.

You have to find a balance of what you believe in and the best of what you don’t necessarily believe in. I used to always stock Barbara Cartland. My mother loved Barbara Cartland. I just didn’t want to say no because if I said “no” over the phone, they’re not going to come in. If I said, “Yes, we have some,” then they have to come along and then they might find something else. And that’s whole idea of making someone curious. It happens to me all the time in here, is that you find something you had no idea of.

You can listen to people. You can learn from people. And I tell all the young booksellers, you’ve got the opportunity to learn from your customer.

What are you reading these days?

I just finished an old Raymond Chandler book. And I thought, I love James Bond books. And I decided I would re-read James Bond.

Do you like to re-read?

As I’ve grown older, it’s been something that’s happened. I learned this from Hemingway. You can read The Old Man and the Sea every decade, every five years, and you will see something different. You will feel something different. And I think that’s real magic. You can re-read something and you as a person changes. But that writer magically writes something that changes with you.

I’ve also been re-reading a lot of Ross Macdonald. Ms. Welty turned me on to him forty-seven years ago. I was re-reading Sleeping Beauty, and so I pulled out a copy of my first edition of Sleeping Beauty. have a signed copy by Ross Macdonald and I have a signed copy by Ms. Welty that she inscribed to me. It means nothing to anybody else, but it means something to me. And I opened it up, and I had forgotten that I had it. It was hand-written note, folded up on a piece of paper—Ross Macdonald, thanking Ms. Welty for her writing a review of The Underground Man. I must have bought it forty to forty-five years ago. And folded it up and put it in my book, and there it was, right after I read it.

You’ve known so many Mississippi writers, and you know so many Mississippi writers. Is there anyone that you think everyone should know about?

A Southern writer that I would want readers to know about is Mary Ward Brown. She’s from around Montgomery, Alabama. We got to know her in the middle of the late eighties. And I fell in love with her writing. And when Ms. Welty quit writing fiction, Mary Ward started writing fiction. And so she captures the same essence of the seventies and eighties. And I’m a big fan of Michael Farris Smith’s writing. I think he can maybe write us a great book one day. That’s asking a lot.

You have high standards.

Mississippi has high standards. Take Shelby Foote and Walker Percy, Ms. Welty, Faulkner, and many others. You got Willie, you got Barry Hannah. It’s a lot to live up to.

Tell us about the upcoming fiftieth birthday celebration for Lemuria.

I had this wild hair idea, that I wanted to have a party. As crazy as that sounds, that’s what I wanted to do. And I want to do it with my friends—I want to have them part of the fun. I want to have the Mississippi Book Festival there. And I want to have Mike Frascogna there—he comes in the store all the time. He’s part of our store and heart. I want to celebrate fifty years with my son at Cathead, at his business. He worked at Lemuria behind the counter, he wrapped presents. He grew up here. And the idea of finding Anthony Thaxton, becoming friends with him. And I want these people who are my friends, who love the bookstore, working to throw a party for the bookstore.

It’s our party—and it’s your party. I want something for the kids and families, writers and readers, music all day. We’re going to read, we're going to have book characters. We’ve got kites to give to the kids with the old Larry the lemur logo on it. And if Richard Howorth’s able to come down, we’ll be able to close it out with a conversation about bookselling. Together we’ve got about 100 years.

I think that to create a day that has that variety of spirit fits Lemuria. The time is right to celebrate downtown Jackson. We’re not doing at the event at the bookstore—we’re doing it in downtown Jackson.

In 1975, John Evans opened Lemuria in a converted apartment stuffed full of books in The Quarter in Jackson, Mississippi. Two years later, Lemuria moved to Highland Village, tripling in size. But it was the move to Banner Hall in 1988 that allowed the bookstore to expand inventory and really get down to the business of books. With new hardbacks, paperbacks, and a children’s section called OZ, Lemuria has something for everyone. As the store grew, John studied Bookman’s Weekly, writing to other booksellers to build Lemuria’s collection of collectible first edition books. The First Edition Club, which John started in 1993, further differentiated the bookstore from other big box chain stores. Over the decades, John has built valuable author relationships with authors including Jackson native Eudora Welty, Willie Morris, Barry Hannah, Ellen Gilchrist, Jim Harrison, Richard Ford, Larry Brown, John Grisham, Greg Iles, Jesmyn Ward, Angie Thomas, and many others. With signing events almost every week, there’s always an opportunity to meet a beloved author or discover a new favorite.

Subscribe now

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Subscribe now

Where are you from?

Born in Chicago, but lived in rural parts of Western New York, Kansas, Iowa, and the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio, and Phoenix, Arizona. 

When did you move to Mississippi and why did you move here?

In 2017, I was invited to be the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. My husband and I were both English professors and had been dealing with an English department in Western New York where the majority of members were extremely backward and racist, so we thought it would be a refreshing change of scenery for nine months. But I can clearly remember less than one month into our move to Oxford, and the whole family fell in love with this town and its people. The university was hiring a poet that year and I threw my hat into the ring. When they called to tell me the news I got the position, I cried joyful tears. This is where I wanted to build and be in community and be outdoors. We sold our house in New York and moved the whole family down here that summer. 

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

Home is not just a place, it's people. It's a scent. It's what you can grow in a garden and what you can grow in your community. After chasing that word all my life I've come to realize as I near a landmark decade that the word “home” is a shapeshifter. And there can be multiple homes that you hold in your heart. 

Order NIGHT OWL

What do you miss most about the place where you’re from?

Because I hold many places for that answer so fondly, it's impossible to answer that in a questionnaire, but rather it's a question that perfumes all the books I've written and will write in the future, and I’ll spend the rest of my life answering that question with gladness, not sorrow.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

My brilliant colleagues and the people in this town (and there are many) who love books. I’ve also loved spending time with people who have nothing to do with academia, including my birding and community garden pals here, and writers and photographers and painters and chefs and the bounty of good folks who make and raise delicious fresh goods at our Oxford Community Market, too.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

That there are racists on every corner (with the assumption that there aren’t any in the north). My husband is from Kansas and we LEFT the smallest minded folk we’d ever encountered in New York State, of all places, to live here. 

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

As someone who writes about and loves to be outdoors and whose family are athletes, being outdoors most months here is something we never take for granted after living in icier climes. I get to move my body and work and garden more outdoors here and all of that has enhanced and augmented how much we value that in our lives.  

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

I knew that a few acclaimed writers lived here, but sheepishly I didn’t know how MANY talented writers live in Mississippi and how much books are truly valued in this state. And I am still struck on a daily basis, no joke, about the sheer physical beauty of this landscape. The green and bloom of summertime and mid-summer tomato sandwiches. Everything fecund and bright. It’s so easy to grow things here and I didn’t know how much I needed to hear (and continue to help cultivate in my neighborhood) birdsong and be near big, bold, and old trees.

Have you ever thought about moving away? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here?  Do you have a “tipping point”?

I can’t say what the future holds as our two sons figure out their college plans in the next few years, but home for me will be anywhere my family feels like it can thrive both indoors and outdoors, and where my husband and I feel useful as mentors for young writers in the classroom and as naturalists, too. 

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

Saying this state has a complicated past is the biggest understatement. Like, duh. I think some people forget that this whole country has origin stories in every state that are violent and unkind. Mississippi has a particular one whose effects I still see every day. And while that is true, I’m heartened to read about the brave fighters and organizers who led and paved the way for the rest of the nation in so many ways. And today, there are SO many people here, like this town is full of them, who believe in caring for each other, who want a world where difference isn’t feared or tamped out. Who believe in education and the arts are necessary for a community to thrive, not just survive.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

I don’t want to choose just one because northern Mississippi is full of creatives (and many are our frequent dinner party guests), but three that capture all that is good about why I am here is 1) the photographer and writer, Erin Austen Abbott. She champions small-town living and finds beauty and delight everywhere she goes. You know how you just see/feel good when you talk with such a golden-hearted person? That’s Erin. She has a new book coming soon this fall that should be on every coffee table in Small Town Living (with an introduction from Erin Napier!). 2) Nadia Alexis, a supremely talented photographer and poet who has her debut book coming soon. And she is a beloved teacher at Mississippi School of the Arts. 3) One of the hardest working creative librarians I know (and I know a TON): Meridith Wulff, who is Head Librarian at Lafayette County and Oxford Public Library. From the first year I was here, I’ve been in awe of how much she gets people of all ages to fall in love with books. I always say libraries and bookstores are the beating hearts of a community, and with her at the helm, we have such a strong heartbeat here in north Mississippi.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

I've been a die-hard college football fan since I was a teenager, and even so, I can’t help but be appalled that in any college town there is anyone who goes to bed hungry or who can’t afford healthcare or a safe place to live, especially when I see the full glorious! fun! and yes, slightly obnoxious display of "football Saturdays." You can love a thing and also offer suggestions because you love it, right? I adore (and participate in!) the school spirit, the fanfare, and losing your voice in a stadium full of cheering fans. But, also, it puts into sharp relief where priorities seem to be misplaced.

Once shelter, food, and access to medicine and mental healthcare is taken care of (oh gosh, what a dreamy daydream, no?!) my hope is I’d make sure there were healthy and free school lunches, and invest in arts education at all levels, from preschool to senior citizens. It should be part of school curriculum that everyone graduates with multiple years of at least one art under their belt (painting, a musical instrument, dance, theatre, etc.). If there was anything left over I’d give it over to more effective and frequent public transportation and have us be less reliant on cars. And no one would use styrofoam or single-use plastics at any football game again. And since we’re dreaming big: every town would have a community garden where people could learn to take care of a garden, for free, and for extra fun for our bodies: a roller rink—with a retractable roof for when it rains!

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

Oxford Community Gardens and Delta Wind Birds: both groups help people see the wonder and beauty of this state and, more than that, help us feel connected (and thus, invested) in protecting and celebrating our lush and lovely green (and blue and brown and pink and orange!) outdoor landscapes. I think the more we are not staring at a screen, the healthier our relationships with each other will be. Birdsong, flowers, fresh vegetables—I’m in awe over so much bounty here in this beautiful state. Experiencing all these things (and having the time to do so) should not be a “privilege” but rather the norm. Let’s see how we can make that happen for ourselves. For each other. 

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.

Book Club with Aimee Nezhukumatathil:

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Subscribe now

Where are you from?

All over the state of Mississippi, I suppose. My dad was a pastor, so we moved around from church to church. I was born in Grenada, where my mother was from, then lived in Clarksdale and Sumner. The church and parsonage in Sumner were just a stone’s throw from the Tallahatchie County courthouse, site of the Emmett Till trial, but I never even heard of Emmett Till and the significance of that courthouse until college. When I was nine or ten, we moved from Sumner to Biloxi, which was quite the change. My teen years were spent in Gautier, where my parents settled down and bought a house. I still have family members in Gautier and the surrounding area.

When did you move to the Baltimore area, and why did you move there?

I currently live in a small, close-in suburb of Baltimore with my husband and children. We moved here from a different area of Maryland because of the school system and the feel of the place. It was a little more dense and city-like than the area we were living before. I’ve always been drawn to the modest, mid-century neighborhoods with small yards and sidewalks, those trick-or-treat neighborhoods with a mix of younger and older folks.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

This is hard to answer if I try to connect that word with any place in particular. I moved around as a child, and as an adult, I’ve lived in three different states (four if you count my college years in Alabama). I suppose, for me, home is a feeling. I remember once when I was six or seven, arriving at my grandmother’s house on Church Street in Grenada. This was back when my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins would all get together fairly often. Leaving the car that day and walking up to the house where all my kin (on my mother’s side) were waiting, I felt such a vivid sense of perfect belonging, just because of who I innately was, not anything I might ever do or not do. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt exactly that way since—not that strongly, anyway. I’m not someone who worries or even thinks much about the afterlife or whether heaven is real. I’m content to “let the mystery be,” like the lyrics from the Iris DeMent song. But if there were a heaven, I think maybe it would be like that: completeness, wholeness, belonging. You’d slip right in like the uniquely shaped, missing piece in a puzzle.

What do you miss most about Mississippi?

I sometimes miss the lush vegetation of the South, in general. Of course, we have lovely flowers, trees, and shrubs in Maryland, especially the red and orange leaves in fall, which seem to glow with an inner light. But summers and spring in the mid-Atlantic do seem a bit anemic, vegetation-wise, compared to the wild, heady, fragrant explosion of plant life I remember from the South.

How have you cultivated community in Baltimore? Do you still feel rooted to Mississippi?

I belong to a wonderful writers’ group here in Baltimore, with members at all levels, from beginner through advanced. The group means a lot to me, and getting together with them at a local brewpub is the highlight of my month. I also belong to an Episcopal church that’s doing important work in the city, particularly with welcoming and supporting immigrants and refugees. In addition to this outreach program, we have an amazing, fiction-centric book group of extremely well-read and extremely nice people. Those are two ways I’ve tried to build community. I’m not naturally outgoing or socially adept. My Mississippi mom always told me I didn’t smile enough, and she was probably right. But I’ve learned that the most important thing I can do to connect with people is quite simple: just keep showing up.

As far as being rooted to Mississippi, how could I not be? My memories root me, along with the fact that my sister, her family, and my father still live there. My mom is buried in Biloxi National Cemetery. But mostly, it’s my writing that keeps me connected to my native state. I can’t seem to write about anywhere else. I’ve tried, but I always find the result bland and unsatisfying.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been there?

I don’t know if this is weird, but I do find it irksome. There’s a widespread assumption, and sometimes it’s subtle, that Mississippi is synonymous with poverty and destitution. And of course, we have poor people. We all know poverty is a problem. But we also have wealthy people, middle class people, working class people, like everywhere else. And those working class people are in no way less intelligent or educated than their counterparts in the rest of the country. In fact, they have an awful lot in common.

How has being from Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

To be honest, Mississippi was a place I wanted to get away from for various reasons, as a young adult. And I did. But I’m not sure you ever really leave Mississippi, not in your soul, and certainly not in a writer’s imagination. The other night, my daughter recorded me reading a story at an open mic. I was shocked by the strength of my southern accent. Do I really sound like that? I wondered. But the phone recording didn’t lie. That was really me. So I’m sure Mississippi has affected my path and identity in many ways, some obvious and others not.

What is something that you’ve come to understand about Mississippi by living elsewhere?

That Mississippi people really do take their time in conversation–prefacing things, coming at them indirectly, telling a story, laying the groundwork. I’m still that way to a certain extent. At least my husband, a more direct communicator who was born in the Midwest, thinks so. I know he sometimes wishes I would “just spit it out,” though he doesn’t use those exact words. Well, just spitting it out seems rude to me, and artless, as well. I can’t help it. I was raised in a place and a culture where people knew how to converse and visit.

Order the book

Have you ever thought about moving back? What would need to happen in order for you to move back to Mississippi?

For practical reasons, I don’t see that happening. For one thing, I have three kids, two of them now adults, and a husband. They have no particular connection to Mississippi, other than the fact that I’m from there. And then there’s the employment issue and all the rest of it. But I do enjoy going down and spending a few days in Ocean Springs when I can.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

That Mississippi is varied and complex, like anywhere else. You can’t just look at the state’s politics or election results and think you know all there is to know about Mississippi.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

I’d like to mention Mark Burr, whose answers have previously been featured in a Rooted questionnaire. He lives on the coast and is creating a literary magazine, The Secret Coast Review, showcasing the work of residents of the coastal counties. I think it’s wonderful, what he’s doing to build a writing community in the Biloxi/Ocean Springs area. If I still lived there, I would definitely get involved. As far as writers, I just read Dominion by Addie Citchens and was completely blown away. What a talent she is, and I’m already impatient for her next novel.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

I’d sit down with a Mississippian who’s working in health care, education, or social justice, and ask them where that money could do the most good. After all, I haven’t lived in Mississippi for decades, and it would be arrogant of me to think I know better than a local person with an in-depth understanding of the state’s most pressing needs.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

My collection of short stories, The Longest Man-Made Beach in the World: Biloxi Stories, was published March 1st by Watertower Press here in Baltimore. It’s a collection of short stories set in or connected to Biloxi. They occur during various historical periods: the Dixie Mafia era of the seventies, the Civil Rights wade-ins of the sixties, the pandemic, the 2000s post-Katrina, and the seafood cannery days of the early twentieth century, when migrant Polish workers would travel seasonally from Baltimore to Biloxi by train. My book isn’t a lighthearted beach read or local color. My characters do suffer. But along with that emotional realism, I hope I’ve also captured a little of the wonder I felt when seeing Biloxi Beach for the first time as a kid. The title of that particular piece, which is a sort of coda to the book, is “Subtropical Wonderland.” But I could just as easily have used the first line of the story as the title: ”Someday you’ll forsake Biloxi Beach for the Redneck Riviera.”

Amelia Franz is the author of The Longest Man-Made Beach in the World: Biloxi Stories. She was born and raised in Mississippi and educated at the University of South Alabama and Texas A&M University. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published widely in literary journals and magazines. She has worked as a K-12 language arts teacher and as an online writing instructor for the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. She lives in the Baltimore area. Her website can be found at ameliafranz.com.

Subscribe now

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Subscribe now

Where are you from?

I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware.

How long did you live in Mississippi and why did you move there?

I lived in Mississippi for fifteen years, and moved there to begin teaching at Mississippi State. My husband (fiction writer Michael Kardos) and I were lucky enough to be offered tenure track positions in the English Department there, and—though we’d never lived in Mississippi, or anywhere in the South—we moved to Starkville right after graduating from our Ph.D. program (at the University of Missouri).

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

To me, “home” is a place where I feel like myself (recognizing that there are lots of versions of “myself”). I’m lucky that I feel that way in a few places, including—emphatically—Mississippi.

What do you miss most about Mississippi?

My friends. My students. The people in general. The arts community. The bookstores. The warmth of early spring.

Order Foxes for Everybody

How have you cultivated community in Delaware? Do you still feel rooted to Mississippi?

I lived in Mississippi from my late twenties until my mid-forties. My children were born there. My career began and grew there. My writing will always, in some way, have Mississippi in its DNA. And some of the closest friendships I’ve ever had grew out of my time in Mississippi. I one-hundred-percent still feel rooted to Mississippi. I think (and hope) I always will.

When we moved to Delaware, suddenly I had family around for the first time in my adult life. I live in the same town as my parents and lots of extended family. Sometimes I run into an aunt or cousin in the grocery store. It’s amazing—such a gift, and one that I don’t take for granted, having lived so long a thousand miles from family. So I was fortunate to have familial community built in as soon as I arrived.

I’ve had to be more intentional about cultivating non-family community—when I moved to Delaware I didn’t have any kind of formal professional network, which I think can make forming a social community more difficult. I’ve been lucky to have met some incredible people through other avenues (my kids’ activities, the local writing community, friends of friends, etc.). I try to say yes to as much as I can, and I’ve also tried to be more proactive in reaching out to set up coffee dates and dinners.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been there?

I wish I had some kind of funny, quirky response to this—but the weirdest assumption I’ve encountered is that people in Mississippi are homogenous. I’ve had to disabuse some people—many of whom would likely consider themselves pretty worldly—of the notion that there’s one type of Mississippian (the one depicted in the most ridiculous popular culture).

How has being from Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

I’m not from Mississippi and I don’t live there now—but my identity and life have been deeply and permanently shaped by my years there. As a writer, my career really began and blossomed in and because of Mississippi. The community I found in other Mississippi writers, the support I received from Mississippi State for my work, the Mississippi landscape (natural, social, political) that informed my poems and occupied my imagination—all of this was utterly formative. The friendships I forged during my time there are special and ongoing. And I like to think that having lived and worked and raised children in a place that’s so often—and so often unfairly—maligned or dismissed has made me more attuned to any assumptions I may find myself making in other parts of my life.

What is something that you’ve come to understand about Mississippi by living elsewhere?

Mississippi knows how to do community. There’s an interconnectedness and a generosity that informs day-to-day life—I’m thinking about everything from crisis response following a natural disaster to grassroots organizing to the ways that various networks immediately and enthusiastically helped me with my work as poet laureate. That ethos of community hums through the state in a way I don’t think I fully recognized until I moved away.

Have you ever thought about moving back? What would need to happen in order for you to move back to Mississippi?

My extended family would need to move there, too. I’m so grateful I got to live in Mississippi as long as I did—but now that I and my loved ones are older, I’m prioritizing being near them.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

Mississippi is not a monolith. There are so many people working every day to make things more just and equitable, fighting for change, protesting, making art that makes the world better, smarter, more vibrant. I wish people outside Mississippi would bring a more critical eye to depictions of the state in movies and TV and dumb jokes. I wish that progressive people in particular would check their own casually dismissive assumptions about an entire state.

Order Dear Beast

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

There are so many incredible writers, artists, and musicians in Mississippi, and I have many favorites—but my real answer to this question is young people. Having worked with K-12 students and college students in the state for a number of years, I can say with absolute conviction that the young people in MS are really doing the thing. During my time as poet laureate (2021-2025), my cornerstone program was the Mississippi Poetry Project, a statewide poetry-writing initiative for students in grades K-12. Every fall, I sent a prompt to teachers across the state, who were then invited to ask their students to write poems responding to the prompt. Teachers then sent me their top three per grade, and all of those schoolwide winners’ poems were compiled into an anthology. What this meant was that I spent hours every winter reading hundreds of poems written by young people across Mississippi—and those hours were consistently some of the most joyous of my year. I was so heartened by the students’ thoughtful, honest, sometimes hilarious, sometimes devastating, sometimes deeply weird poems. Here are people considering who they are and where they are, and using language to express those considerations. These are the people who are coming up in the state and the world, and that fills me with hope.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

I’d spend it on access—specifically in the areas of the arts, medical care, and transportation. So many people can’t easily access what they need to thrive, including arts programming and specialized medical care. I’d invest in developing programs and centers to make these necessities more accessible to more people. I’d also invest in a great, low-cost public transportation system that could get folks from place to place easily and efficiently. Admittedly I have no idea how much any of this would cost, but let’s go with one billion.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

I have two new books out: a memoir-in-essays called Foxes for Everybody: Twenty-Four Hours of Early Motherhood (this came out in January from Northwestern University Press) and a poetry collection called Dear Beast (out on March 16th from Saturnalia Books). I’ve also recently launched an online poetry community called Studio & Craft, through which I teach workshops via Zoom and offer generative sessions and manuscript consultations (would love to see some Rooted readers in some of those offerings!). Finally, in early April I’ll be doing a mini Mississippi book tour along with my husband Michael Kardos—we each have two new books out, and will be doing events at Friendly City Books, Lemuria, Square Books, and MSU. Come say hey!

Catherine Pierce served as Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2021-2025. She is the author of five books of poems, including the recently released Dear Beast (Saturnalia 2026), as well as of the memoir Foxes for Everybody (Northwestern University Press, 2026). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Best American Poetry, The Nation, The Sun, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and has won two Pushcart Prizes. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets, Pierce co-directed the creative writing program at Mississippi State University for fifteen years and now lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, with her family, where she runs the online poetry community Studio & Craft.

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Subscribe now

Where are you from?

My mother left Denver, Colorado, to give birth to me in her hometown of Jackson so I could say I was from Mississippi. I am from Jackson, Mississippi.

Why did you leave Mississippi? Where did you go?

I have been leaving and returning to Mississippi all my life. When I was three, my Daddy Joe was killed by a train, and my family moved from Denver back to Jackson, where I lived for the next ten years. Halfway through my seventh grade, Mother remarried and we moved to Charlotte. I spent my middle growing-up years in North Carolina and Virginia and, after law school, returned (again) to Jackson to practice law. Nineteen years later, my own re-marriage took me to Memphis. In 2015, we built a beach house in Waveland, and I once more returned. Like I said, leaving and returning and returning and leaving….

Why did you return to Mississippi?

This most recent time, my husband and I were looking for a place our family could gather from New Orleans and Memphis. When we drove down Beach Boulevard away from Bay St. Louis into Waveland, it was as if I had driven back in time. Intellectually, I knew why the beach was so “undeveloped:” a horrendous storm had wiped it clean, but it felt like the Coast of my childhood. I never thought I would again have a house in Mississippi, but I do.

Was the Mississippi you returned to the same one you had left?

Nope, never was. The city I left in 1969 was a stepped-on ant hill of white flight from school desegregation. When I returned in the early 1980s, the state was beginning to reckon with its past, prosecuting old racists and opening the Sovereignty Commission files. When I left in the early 2000s, that era seemed to be coming to a close, as the first vote to change the flag failed. When I returned in 2015, it was to a Coast community where “All Are Welcome” signs designed by artist Ann Madden dotted shop windows in response to the anti-LGBTQ bill. People tend to see Mississippi as set in concrete, but no place ever is.

What does home mean to you?

Home is where place and people combine to weave love. I need both, the sense of place and the presence—even if spectral—of those I love. It can be inherited (like Jackson or Ocean Isle Beach where my North Carolina family has held reunions for over fifty years) or created, like I did with Memphis (New Orleans is birthing itself into my home; it takes longer here ‘cause the rules are different.) Once a place becomes home, it remains home for me, even as grief taints its loss.

How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

My Jackson home is my grandparent’s farm on Spring Ridge Road and my Bigmama’s double-balconied house in downtown Jackson and my Belhaven neighborhood where we played “Tiger, Tiger” in the night and the firms were I practiced law and Capitol Street where I paraded on St. Paddy’s Day and Cedar Lawn where Daddy Joe is buried. And now it’s my family creating a home at the beach, camping on Cat Island, floating the Jourdan River, eating supper on the screened porch, riding the golf cart to get ice cream. I have grieved for Mississippi every time I’ve left.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi?

I was born into community with family and friends who have been with me through every Mississippi iteration. This time around, I fell into it when Rachel Dangermond invited me to be Writer-in-Residence at 100 Men Hall in Bay St. Louis. The Hall is an iconic Blues site where The Writing Room meets every second Saturday to write together for three hours from prompts I offer. Later, Alisha Johnson Perry and I started a Contemplative Writing Group whose community stretches across the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Ocean Springs—we meet weekly on Zoom and hold in-person gatherings, with our next one on Ship Island. I also keep up with what’s happening in the Mississippi writing community through Professor C. Liegh McInnis’s fabulous Psychedelic Literature newsletter.

Another major community for me has been the Mississippi Episcopal Diocese Racial Reconciliation Task Force. We led Days of Dialogue around the state and worked together to help erect a historical maker in Vicksburg honoring Sheriff Peter Crosby, the first African American sheriff of Warren County. I was specifically involved in that effort because my ancestor was one of the perpetrators of the Vicksburg Massacres that ousted Sheriff Crosby from office and afterwards rampaged through the county, killing innocent Black Mississippians, which is a whole story.

Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

Surely it’s those dead and alive who hold those roots in the soil for me. My Mississippi family and long-term friends, cousins and godchild and sister and brother-in-law and so many others, including the new people in my life—writers and activists and those striving to bring us all together in love. But my Bigmama is still there in the downtown Jackson house and Mamo is still on the farm feeding the cows and Mother is still in the Belhaven house she bought with her own money and my childhood friends are still walking me to Power School and I’m still practicing law and I’m still watching my Uncle Hebron enjoy his purple martin houses and I am still that skinny-legged girl who never knew she would live anywhere but Mississippi.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

Lord, when I was practicing law in Jackson, I often did the recruiting trips to the Southeast law schools. I won’t say which school, but in one interview a woman said she wanted to practice corporate law but didn’t know if we had corporations in Mississippi. Otherwise, it’s got to be white folks who say “Mississippi” and mean only white Mississippians, failing to realize they’ve defined all the Black folks out of the state.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

I was raised by an iconoclastic mother in what historians have called the closest thing to a fascist state America has ever experienced. This gave me a deep-boned, knee-jerk antipathy to dominate groups. I will side with the underdog until they begin to ascend and oppress, then I’m switching sides. I hate peer pressure, bullying, judging, conformity, group think, and enforcing. It has also given me that double reality of constantly holding something I love up to inspection.

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has living in Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

That people can be the most good-hearted, giving, loving people, until you violate racial or other social mores. If I hadn’t lived here for decades, I might not look beyond the stereotypes to see the good. If I hadn’t lived away, I might not understand how often caring is conditioned on compliance with those mores. As to expectations, I put up an Episcopal shield in my garden in Waveland. The shield has a quadrant featuring a rainbow flag in support of the LGBTQ community. I bought the shield in metal—if someone was going to tear it down, they were gonna have to mean it. It hasn’t been touched.

Do you still think about moving away someday? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?

Ha, ha—I’ve moved away so many times, I can’t say I won’t again. In the meantime, I’m here because I want to be, no sense of duty in it, never has been. If I leave now, it will be because I age out of the energy it takes to live in more than one place at a time.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

The rest of the country considers Mississippi an outlier, an aberration. It’s not. From the “Mississippi Plan” of Reconstruction to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v Wade to everything new in American literature—we are an inflection point that exports change. It’s just not always the change everyone wants.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about? Or is there a Mississippi change-maker who you think everyone needs to know about?

I want everyone to know about 100 Men Hall in Bay St. Louis. The Hall is a Rolling Stone magazine “Must See Venue.” Go to the website—100menhall.com— and sign up for the newsletter to get notices on everything Rachel Dangermond has going on. Blues brunches, live music, film screenings, Booker Fest, Santa visits, book signings, craft markets. Or visit in person so you can read the list of musicians who’ve played the Hall—it will blow your mind.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

I’d set up a fund for Civil Rights reparations, and start by paying back all the taxes collected from Black Mississippians when they didn’t have equal access to public parks, public zoos, public beaches, public libraries, public hospitals, public buses, public orphanages, public nursing homes, public mental health facilities, public lakes like the one where I learned to water ski…If that sounds impossible, well, there you have it.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

I’m putting together a collection of writings that center my family. One is my literary fantasy coming out in April, When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women (Literary Wanderlust). It’s a Mississippi story set in New Orleans that features my ancestral grannies…exaggerated a bit. The other is a memoir I’m working on, Loving My Hateful Ancestors: A Public Struggle to Accept My Family’s Hand in History. Several excerpts from the memoir have been published, including “Granddaughter of the Instigator,” which made Salvation South’s “best of” list for 2025, receiving an Honorable Mention.

Ellen Morris Prewitt is an award-winning author who weaves her Southern life—and family secrets—into her writing. Her stories have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize; one received a Special Mention. A former lawyer, she’s Writer-in-Residence at 100 Men Hall, an iconic Mississippi Blues site. Her essays, short stories, radio commentaries, and magazine articles have been extensively published, including in Image, Brevity, Porchlight, Texas Review, Southern Women’s Review, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, Unleash Lit, Barrelhouse, Arkansas Review, The Pinch, storySouth, and EAP the Magazine. For eight years, she led a weekly writing group of Memphians experiencing homelessness. She edited Writing Our Way Home: A Group Journey Out of Homelessness (Nautilus Press) and authored Making Crosses (Paraclete Press), two self-published novels, a bespoke hand-bound novel, a writing group handbook, and an award-winning audio short story collection whose stories have been downloaded over 50,000 times. When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women (Literary Wanderlust, 2026) is her first traditionally-published novel. She splits her time between Memphis, the Gulf Coast, and New Orleans where she (and her husband and her dog…and her house) can frequently be found in costume.

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Subscribe now

Where are you from?

I was born in Compton, California, and raised in Robinsonville, Mississippi.

How long have you lived in Mississippi?

I’ve lived in Mississippi since I was two years old.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition

Home is wherever I am. It isn’t always a physical space or a familiar structure—it’s a state of being. I am always at home with myself, and Mississippi is where that understanding took root.

How have you cultivated a community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

Community for me has come from showing up—listening before speaking, collaborating instead of extracting, and staying even when it would’ve been easier to leave. I’ve been rooted by artists, organizers, elders, and cultural workers who believe Mississippi is not something to escape but something to tend. The people who’ve made me feel at home here are those committed to imagining futures for this place while honoring its history—people who understand that care is a practice, not a performance.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here

People believe Mississippi is stuck in the past and we can’t keep up with what’s going on in the rest of the world. Innovation, culture, resistance, and beauty are happening here constantly, often without permission or visibility.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

Living here shaped my commitment to storytelling, to place-based work, and to creating infrastructure for people who are often overlooked. It made my path less about escape and more about return.

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

Mississippi can be deeply challenging and deeply loving at the same time. Transformation here doesn’t always look loud—it’s slow, relational, and rooted. Mississippi is resilient, creative, and full of surprises.

Do you ever consider moving away someday? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?

I know this chapter in Mississippi is not forever. After my work at Sipp Culture, I plan to live in another country and become a citizen there. Still, this place shaped how I move through the world. Mississippi isn’t some place I’ll leave behind—it’s something I’ll carry with me, informing how I show up wherever I land next.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

Mississippi is where people are imagining bold futures with limited resources and limitless creativity. If you want to understand this country with its contradictions, its beauty, its unfinished work, you have to pay attention to Mississippi.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

At this point in my life, I’m my favorite writer—not because I don’t admire others, but because I’m deeply engaged with my own evolution. I’m focused on developing my voice and I’m interested in what it means to tell Mississippi stories that feel contemporary, complex, and authentic.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

I would invest in people, infrastructure, and ownership. A significant portion would go directly to supporting Sipp Culture’s mission—ensuring long-term sustainability for cultural workers, designers, and artists across the state. I’d build a creative guild and a media production company with global marketing capacity, designed to help Mississippi creatives develop work, retain ownership, and reach international audiences. Beyond the arts, I’d invest in education, housing, healthcare access, and rural broadband—because creative futures only thrive when basic needs are met.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

I want to highlight the Rural Routes Design Lab + Studio, where I serve as Project Director, supporting artists who are using their work to transform rural Mississippi communities. I’d also like to share Saint’s Emerald City’s apparel line, SAINTxSINNA.com—an earned revenue stream that supports local creatives and funds future film and media projects. The line is rooted in the idea of duality, created for people who embrace both sides of who they are.

Saint Allen Austin is a writer, artist, and cultural producer based in Mississippi. His work exists at the intersection of storytelling, design, and community-building, with a focus on supporting artists who are actively shaping the future of rural places. He currently serves as Project Director of the Rural Routes Design Lab + Studio at the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture), where Saint supports artists using their creative practice to transform rural Mississippi communities through design-led, place-based work.

Saint is the founder of Saint’s Emerald City, Inc., a media production and distribution company dedicated to developing culturally resonant film, media, and storytelling projects. Under its umbrella is The Ensemble Guild, Mississippi’s premier professional organization for creative professionals across film, television, music, theatre, visual art, and arts education. The Guild is dedicated to recognizing, cultivating, and advancing artistic excellence by providing structured resources, industry-level networking, and strategic advocacy—ensuring creative professionals are valued and their voices are heard.

Saint’s Emerald City also includes SAINTxSINNA, an apparel line rooted in the idea of duality and created for those who embrace the fullness of who they are. The line functions as an earned revenue stream that benefits local creatives and helps fund future film, media, and cultural projects.

As a writer, Saint explores themes of place, memory, and becoming, often examining how identity is shaped by land, history, and imagination. Across all of his work, he is committed to building sustainable creative infrastructure, expanding global audiences for Mississippi artists, and ensuring Southern stories are told with care, complexity, and ownership.

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Subscribe now

Where are you from?

A reasonable person would say I’m from Connecticut—I spent nearly all of my first eighteen years there. But I never felt, well, rooted. As a kid, I sometimes told people I was from Chicago, which was technically true, since I was born there. But my family moved to Connecticut when I was three months old.

When did you move to New Orleans and why did you move there?

Well, first, and importantly, I moved to the Mississippi Delta in 2009 to take a job with Teach For America. Since I was a kid, I’d dreamed of “being a writer”—which I put in quotations, since I had little real idea what that meant—and I had intuited that getting to a place and culture entirely different from the suburbs I knew in the Northeast might help.

And, indeed, I found that living in a state with so much literary history sort of forced my hand. It helped that there were local magazines willing to publish my work. By 2018, I was working full time as a magazine writer. I wasn’t tethered to an office anymore, and on something of a whim, I decided to spend a summer in New Orleans. After sleeping on my best friend’s couch for three months, I decided to stick around.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

The poet Gary Snyder argues that the world’s true boundaries are watersheds. Rivers create territories that are literally carved into the earth, rather than dictated by politics. By that metric, I’m a citizen of the land of the Lower Mississippi.

I fell in love with the Mississippi River while living in the Delta: I wrote a profile of John Ruskey, owner of the Quapaw Canoe Company and now a dear friend, and after that trip, I got obsessed. In 2018, when I moved down to New Orleans, I was taking notes for what would become my first book, The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi.

But the entire South has come to feel like home, too—in a way I never expected when I first moved to Mississippi. So much of my journalism has been about Southern landscapes and habitats. That’s a part of why I launched Southlands.

What do you miss most about Mississippi?

There’s a sense of open-heartedness. It feels like a Mississippi instinct to seek connection and establish kinship—as if, because we are fellow Mississippians, we are necessarily connected. Most people I met there defaulted to a welcoming mode. Unless you proved otherwise, you deserved to be embraced.

Just one example: It meant a lot to me as a young writer that, as soon as I started publishing, other writers in Mississippi began to welcome me as a peer. Long before they had any reason to, folks like Alan Huffman and Richard Grant and Scott Barretta and John T. Edge took me seriously, which allowed me to take myself seriously.

How have you cultivated community in New Orleans? Do you still feel rooted to Mississippi?

I probably should do a better job of being intentional about it. But I do try to carry that spirit of Mississippi generosity down into this city—trying to lend whatever support I can to other people trying to make it in the craziness of the literary world. It’s not New Orleans-specific, but it’s another part of why I launched Southlands, which gives me a platform for helping other writers.

But, yes, I still feel rooted in Mississippi. I get back often, both for work and to visit friends. Attending the Mississippi Book Festival in 2024 sticks out to me: The night I arrived, I found myself sitting at a bar with a handful of writers who I’d long looked up to. Most of them had never heard of me before, but in that Mississippi fashion I’ve already described, they welcomed me with open arms. It was a reminder that Mississippi will always be my literary home.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been there?

I come from a very progressive family, and sometimes when I’m back home visiting my mom, we’ll be at a cocktail party, and someone will say something like, Oh, I could never live in a red state like that. Maybe that’s not that weird or surprising, unfortunately. But it just strikes me as myopic. Two out of every five voters in Connecticut went for Trump in 2024; two out of every five Mississippi voters went for Harris.

How has being from Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

I recently got to participate in a great convening about writing in the South. The organizing principle was, basically: we have less access to literary journals here. We have less access to agents. How can we uplift one another to compete with writers in New York City?

But while I was there, it struck me that I probably wouldn’t have made it as a writer had I not moved to Mississippi. I would have been overwhelmed in New York City. It was that welcoming spirit that allowed me to live out this dream.

What is something that you’ve come to understand about Mississippi by living elsewhere?

Maybe it’s that this open-arms thing I’ve mentioned a few times is more Mississippi than Southern I’ve got great writer friends here in New Orleans, but it’s never felt so connected as up in Mississippi.

Have you ever thought about moving back? What would need to happen in order for you to move back to Mississippi?

There are many reasons I’d love to, though I’ve also become deeply tied to New Orleans. One of the bigger challenges would be my wife’s tenure-track job at Tulane.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

That the bits of culture they already know about—blues music, Faulkner, and so on—isn’t an anomaly. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, we have a lot of problems; not every Mississippian faces those problems squarely. But so often those who do are all the more thoughtful, creative, and generous for doing so.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

Let me circle back to last year’s Mississippi Book Festival: at the opening party, a man introduced himself to me, and said he’d been following my writing for more than a decade. Which sounded almost impossible. I’d barely published anything a decade earlier.

But that man turned out to be Jason Watson, the son of Brad Watson—one of my all-time favorite writers. I’d emailed Brad when I first started writing, with a question about an MFA program. That was our only exchange, ever. Brad passed away in 2020.

But, after that email arrived, Brad had looked up my writing, which was mostly self-published online at that point. And passed it along to Jason, and said something along the lines of “This guy is going to go somewhere.” That really captures the Mississippi spirit I’m talking about. It was really moving.

But, more importantly, Brad’s work is phenomenal. And, nice guy or not, it deserves to be read for that fact alone!

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

It’s probably best used just starting to make up for the huge, decades-long shortfall in funding for public education. But I’d love to set aside a little pot to help Mississippi musicians and writers and artists pursue the projects of their dreams.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

I hope people will check out Southlands, the new print magazine I launched last year. We publish twice a year, in an oversized format — the kind of big, chunky magazine that looks great on your coffee table. (The designers did such a phenomenal job with Issue No. 01.) But I’m really proud, too, of just how good all the writing and photography and art is. One of my Mississippi mentors, someone who’s been around the publications world, told me he sees National Magazine Awards in our future. I don’t know about that yet, but it’s definitely where we’re aiming.

And, while there wasn’t much Mississippi in Issue No. 01, we’re making up for that in Issue No. 02, arriving this spring. If you’re interested in the landscapes and ecosystems of the South, I hope you’ll check it out.

Boyce Upholt is a writer and “nature critic” based in New Orleans. He is the author of The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi (W.W. Norton, 2024), a national bestseller and the winner of the 2024 Willie Morris Prize for Southern Writing in nonfiction. His writing about culture, nature, and the environment has appeared or is forthcoming in National Geographic, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Boyce is also the founding editor of Southlands, a new print magazine about nature and the outdoors in the U.S. Southeast.

More Boyce Upholt:

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Subscribe now

Where are you from?

In 1989, I was born in Biloxi, Mississippi, at Biloxi Regional Hospital (now Merit Biloxi). My parents are Vietnamese refugees that left Vietnam in 1978 and arrived in America in 1980. They arrived on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi in 1987.

How long have you lived in Mississippi?

I have lived in Mississippi my entire thirty-six years of my life. I have left to go on travel nurse assignments but I always come back home to Mississippi.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

Home is all of the chapters of my life pieced together into my own personal journey. Mississippi holds so much of my own family’s history and the Vietnamese refugee community’s history.

How have you cultivated a community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

I started the first permanent Vietnamese refugee exhibit. There was no historical exhibit about the Vietnamese refugees’ arrival until my friend Jennifer Le and I started Gulf Coast Vietnamese Narratives. With the exhibit, we were able to bridge generations that arrived and the one-and-a-half generations, like me, with the third generations.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

People assume all of Mississippi is the same. When I travel as a nurse in Missouri, people say they drive through the Delta of Mississippi and think the entire state is just like the Delta. If you have ever been to the Delta it is very rural and still has a lot of poverty. I have to remind them that I am from the Gulf Coast and it is entirely different from the rest of the state.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

I moved to Jackson, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina and that was the first time I ever felt like I was a minority. When I lived in Biloxi and went to school in the 1990s, 50% of the student body at Biloxi Public Schools were Vietnamese students. When I went to Jackson, the schools were either 99% Black or white depending on which metropolitan city you were in. I had never seen or experienced that before.

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

There is more culture and history in Mississippi than we are given credit for. There are so many communities such as the Slavics, Lebanese, Polish, and Sicilians that no one talks about. People only think of it as a white or black culture due to stereotypes of Hollywood.

Do you ever consider moving away someday? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?

I always want to move away, but my parents are here. I had two older brothers that passed away during and after the pandemic and they are buried in Mississippi. My parents will never move. I am glad I did not move, because if I did, I would have never started Gulf Coast Vietnamese Narratives and started our first permanent Vietnamese refugee exhibit on the coast at the Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum in Biloxi.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

We are more than what you see in the movies. We have so many cultural influences that are beyond how they portray us.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

I love Eudora Welty and John Grisham. One of my favorite books is The Boys from Biloxi by John Grisham. He did an amazing job describing the Coast of Mississippi and I enjoyed reading about the streets and neighborhoods where I grew up in his book. Even though it was fiction, he did wonderfully describe our hometown.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

I would love to invest more into the humanities. With the world at each other’s throats on social media and the news, we need more humanities that bring people together to hear one another’s stories. Everyone has a story, and if we can take the time to listen, this can make the world a better place, beyond the news or what we see on social media.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

I am currently working on starting the first Vietnamese refugee museum in Mississippi, and I am also completing my memoir. It will be called This Bich: A daughter of Mississippi Vietnamese Refugees Memoir. I have not completed it yet, but I want to finish it to give more daughters of the Vietnamese community a voice of our lived experiences on the coast of Mississippi. People assume that just because our parents arrived and touched American soil that our life became easy suddenly. I want to change that and raise awareness that we had our own struggles to growing up in poverty, racial tension, and mental health struggles.

Emma Phuong To is a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA) based in Jackson, Mississippi, and an educator in the Nurse Anesthesia program at the University of Southern Mississippi. Born in Biloxi, Mississippi, Emma spent her early years in the Bayou Auguste housing projects, subsidized housing for the low income. Emma’s parents are Vietnamese refugees who arrived in America in 1980. Her father worked as a shrimper and her mother in a seafood processing factory before transitioning to the casino industry.

Emma grew up with three older brothers who attended Biloxi Public Schools. After the heartbreaking loss of two of her brothers, she found herself searching for their yearbooks at the Biloxi Public Library, where a conversation with history and genealogy librarian Jane Shambra led her to The Mississippi Gulf Coast Seafood Industry by Dr. Deanne Stephens. Inspired by the book, Emma reached out to Dr. Stephens and soon reconnected with her friend Jennifer Le to create Gulf Coast Vietnamese Narratives.

Recognizing the need to preserve the heritage and voices of Vietnamese refugees and their descendants, Emma and Jennifer proposed incorporating Vietnamese history into the Maritime & Seafood Industry Museum. Through her grief, Emma has found purpose in telling the stories of her community, ensuring that the struggles, resilience, and contributions of Vietnamese families on the Mississippi Gulf Coast are remembered.

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Order Conversations with Ellen Gilchrist

Where are you from?

I grew up in Garland, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. My parents are from Centreville, Mississippi, so even though I am technically a native Texan, I feel like I have dual citizenship.

How long have you lived in Mississippi?

I first moved here to start a master’s in English at Mississippi State in December 1995. After getting my degree, I stayed in Starkville and taught as an instructor for a couple of years before moving (in rapid succession) to the following places: Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, St. Louis, Tuscaloosa again, and Birmingham again. I am very good at packing a U-Haul. In December 2003, I moved to Jackson for a library job and I’ve been here ever since. I live in Belhaven and have no interest in living anywhere else, especially since my street got paved a few months ago. (So smooth!)

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

Home is where you can let your shoulders relax and be around people who get you. For a minute there when I was moving every year, I wasn’t sure I would find a place that felt like home, but Mississippi, and Jackson in particular, is just so weird and interesting to me. I had heard the Eudora Welty anecdote about how when Henry Miller came to Jackson, she took him to the same restaurant every night, but used different entrances, and he left thinking, “Imagine a town like this having three good restaurants!”

One of the first things I did when I moved here was look up what restaurant it was (the Rotisserie) and find out where it was at the time (“Pocahontas Highway at Five Points,” which turns out to be where Woodrow Wilson Avenue, Livingston Road, and Medgar Evers Boulevard meet) so I could understand how you could go in three different doors and plausibly not know you were in the same place. So I suppose that based on this story, “home” means a place where I can explore an idea or dig into an interesting anecdote to satisfy my nosy/curious nature, and where it might be a little odd, but not totally insane.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

I think of Mississippi as the place that I became myself. When I went to undergrad at the University of North Texas (which was about forty-five minutes from Garland), I roomed with my best friend, Heidi; this was super fun and we had a great time, but I didn’t make very many other friends. I have a sparse handful of people from that time that I still talk to. But when I moved to Starkville, I did it alone. While I did spend the first semester watching a lot of television, and some weeks the only human person I spoke to outside of class was my underage cousin, for whom I bought beer on a regular schedule, eventually something clicked and I made friends. All the friends. Almost every person that I love in the world, I found there. I am very sentimental about my Starkville years and all the smart and talented weirdos that I met there. Later, when I moved to Jackson, while it sounds kind of weird now, in the height of the early 2000s blogging boom, I had a semi-popular, semi-pseudonymous blog and met people that way. Not too long ago, actually, someone asked me, “Are you Sally Nordan?” which was my fake blog name and which pleased me to no end. (Insert that “Sure, Grandma, let’s get you back to bed” meme here.)

My professional career in libraries gave me the opportunity to work on projects and programs with great minds from other arts and culture institutions, which was not only fulfilling, but fun. I think fun is an underrated necessity that sparks innovation. One of the most fun things I was ever involved in was the 2017 update of the Mississippi Literary Map, which was unveiled at the Mississippi Book Festival by Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden. The brilliant Ginger Williams Cook did the portraits and the Mississippi Humanities Council provided the funding. And being on the board of the Mississippi Book Festival has definitely rooted me here, as has working at Lemuria Books. Book people are the best people!

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

For years, I manned the Mississippi booth at the Roadmap to Reading exhibit at the National Book Festival. While most people were kind and would tell us all about that one time they visited the state in 1984 or would make their kids spell it (always the crooked letter/humpback rendition), I did have a lady who told me she’d been reading Eudora Welty lately and was so impressed with all the big words she knew. “How did she know all those words?” she asked. I told her I supposed she read a lot. “Oh,” she said. “Do you have libraries there?” I told her we did and she seemed surprised. “Are they segregated?” This was probably fifteen years ago and I still think about it all the time. That was the most extreme, though I was at a conference once and when I said I was from Mississippi, a woman scrunched up her face and said, “Why?” as if I said I lived in a festering dumpster. I wish I’d said something witty or cutting, but I said, “Someone has to,” and I’ve felt bad for it ever since.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

In some ways, it feels predestined that I ended up here. Without doing it consciously, as a teenager and young adult, my favorite books were by Mississippi authors. I picked up an Ellen Gilchrist book at random at my public library in 1990 and fell hard for her. I can recite big swaths of dialogue from Crimes of the Heart (the movie version, but still). I found that Tennessee Williams plays stabbed me directly in the heart, especially The Glass Menagerie. Later, when I was an English instructor, I could not teach it without crying. Those stage directions are poetry, and Tom’s last monologue wrecks me every time. (Am I tearing up just thinking about it now? Yes.) Later, part of my job was creating programs and projects around Mississippi authors, and it helped that I already had this built-in knowledge and deep admiration to work from. As an English major, you just kind of have to follow the thing you love and hope for the best since all the poetry factories have closed down (my standard dumb joke about being an English major), which has really worked out for me.

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

Due to my dual citizenship, I had an inkling that Mississippi might be something other than what it seems, but living here solidified that. Mississippi is complicated; it’s at once all the things people think it is, but is also overwhelmingly bursting with stories to tell and kind people and writers and artists and relics and hidden histories.

When I was a new Mississippian thirty years ago, my friend Ryan Davis asked, “Hey, you want to go see a dead rat?” I said sure. A rat had impaled itself on a chain link fence on his street and was kind of quickly rotting away. That summer we checked on the rat’s decomposition process once a week or so. While that is a gross story and you’re probably throwing up right now, I think of it as the beginning of the realization that here, you have to make your own fun. You don’t even have to look that far for it if you’re looking with the right attitude. Thanks, rotting rat, for teaching me about perspective!

I was lucky to get that lesson early on. Mississippi has never stopped being weird and hilarious and heartbreaking and gorgeous to me. When I take a walk, whether it’s through my neighborhood or around downtown Jackson, I see things and wonder, what was that building before? What things went on there? Where does that street lead? I don’t think I could be happy living in a place that was too new. I love digging around in the layers of history.

And I hope I’m always the kind of person who looks like she might want to go see a dead rat.

Do you ever consider moving away someday? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?

The moment I say I would never do something, something would arise to contradict me, so anything’s possible. But I don’t intend to move away. It’s not a sense of duty, but I kind of feel like if I can live with the humidity and low water pressure and sometimes no water at all and that couple of weeks where I had to Venmo some guy to pick up my trash—if I can think of those as annoyances and not dealbreakers, I feel like I’ve earned some badges for my sash. (Can someone please design those, Girl Scout style?) I’m sure I have a tipping point, but there are a lot of other factors that would have to also be tipping in the same direction.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

The main thing I wished people knew is that Mississippi is not one thing. I know it’s easy to make an assumption about a state you’ve never been to, but Mississippi is more than what everyone thinks it is. I want to make it clear that it is or has been or can be those things, but it’s that combination of good and bad, joyous and horrifying, that makes it so remarkable. Mississippi continues to produce artists, writers, and musicians at an almost alarming rate! How could that be if everyone is as backwards as some people think? Also, this place is really, really beautiful. And so varied! We’ve got beaches and Delta and trees and hills and a real-life volcano under the city of Jackson!

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

I have a long list of Mississippi writers I’m enthusiastic about everyone knowing about: Brad Watson, Ellen Gilchrist, and Lewis Nordan are probably my top three, but I feel like people know about them. If you DON’T know about them, I’m a little jealous because you have some A+ quality reading ahead of you. A writer that needs more recognition is Anne Moody, whose Coming of Age in Mississippi should be required reading. I also loved Addie Citchens’s Dominion and can’t wait to see what else she does. That book is full of surprises and contradictions and twists; it’s a perfect metaphor for Mississippi. Chad Holley’s Shield the Joyous is also a great debut from the last couple of years—it’s kind of a Gen X “Stand by Me” that’s sneaky in the way that it’s equally hilarious and sentimental. I am also a mega-fan of Jackson native Katy Simpson Smith, whose work plunges so deep into the heart of things that I think she might have superpowers. I could talk about Mississippi writers all day (and do, when I’m working at Lemuria Books). On the artist side, I would be remiss without bragging on my dear friend David McCarty’s photography. He captures the South in Polaroid form in all its beauty and broke down glory in a way that is overflowing with love for the place. He is one of my favorite people, full stop.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

I would pour a chunk of that into public libraries, the last great community hub free and open to everyone. I’d love to wave a magic money wand and fix all the buildings so library workers did not have to worry about moving the trash can to catch the leaks or the broken HVAC units and instead could work on what’s really important: connecting to all the members of the community, reaching out to those who don’t visit the library because they think there’s nothing there for them, and providing vital, life-changing services. I’d put the rest into Jackson’s water situation and encourage my new billionaire friends (I assume there’s a club, maybe a listserv?) to do the same and use their insane riches for good.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

I edited a collection of interviews with Ellen Gilchrist for the University Press of Mississippi, Conversations with Ellen Gilchrist, which just came out. (If you haven’t read her, try her first collection of stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams. Then let’s talk.) I’ve also turned in the manuscript of Conversations with Brad Watson (forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi), which should be out about this time next year. And if your organization or civic group needs a speaker for a meeting, you might be interested in my Mississippi Humanities Council Speakers Bureau presentation, “Wanted: 1,000,000 Frogs: Weird and Wonderful Things Found in Old Mississippi Newspapers.” I promise I’m not bragging, but after the last time I did this talk, a lady blew me a kiss.

Tracy Carr is a researcher, editor, and writer in Jackson, Mississippi. A former English instructor and librarian, she has a B.A. in English from the University of North Texas, an M.A. in English from Mississippi State University, and an MLIS from the University of Alabama. In her career as a librarian, she was responsible for several statewide literary programs, including the 2017 update of the Mississippi Literary Map. She serves on the board of the Mississippi Book Festival.

Subscribe now

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Subscribe now

Where are you from?

My hometown, Bruce, is in north central Mississippi. It’s a small, isolated town, and like many out-of-the-way places has gone through decades of decline. It was a wonderful place to grow up. The county, Calhoun, is very rural—Pittsboro, the county seat, has less than 200 people—and my family has been there for almost 200 years. Bruce is archetypical small-town South: a square, a lumber mill, and a cotton gin. The library in town is named after my father.

How long have you lived in Mississippi?

Apart from six wretched years in the Florida panhandle during the mid-1980s, I’ve lived in Mississippi my entire life: Bruce, then Oxford for almost thirty years, a few years in Tupelo, then Jackson for twenty more. Now I call beautiful old Raymond my home.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

Home is a figment of memory evoking a sense of peace and security, a sort of paradise, and, like all true paradises, lost. You can’t go home again. You can, however, frame that peace and security within yourself, and take it with you wherever you go. That home is a work of the mind doesn’t make it any less real or magical.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

In Jackson, I lived in Belhaven where I started a garden in a parking lot. Over twelve years, I filled it with soil, flowers, fruits and vegetables, and bric-a-brac. The garden became a stopping place for people walking dogs, jogging, or just strolling. Neighboring gardeners swapped plants with me. Artists came there to paint. Some brought their work: pots, sculptures, structures. It’s gone now, a barren concrete parking lot again, but the experience taught me that sharing a common interest fosters community. I started the blog, Mississippi Sideboard, for a similar reason, for people interested in food, books, and history. It, too, has become a crossroads. My oldest friends who are still here make me feel rooted; we have much to share with one another, a whirlpool past that keeps us together.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

Years ago, I traveled to Seattle and I was talking to this woman from Germany. She commented on my accent and asked where I was from. When I said “Mississippi” she said, “Oh, those shoes must be uncomfortable for you.” She thought that Mississippians didn’t wear shoes because we’re all so poor and it’s so hot here. She wasn’t mean, that’s just what she believed.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

Mississippi Burning (1988) was released while I lived in Florida, and I was mildly shocked that the people I worked with there believed that Mississippi is very much the same as it was in 1964. I say this by way of explaining that living in Mississippi most of my life has made me somewhat unworldly. I’m not small-minded or bigoted at all, I’m simply acutely aware that I don’t have a very sophisticated outlook. Perhaps provincial is a more apt word. I feel uncomfortable anywhere else but Mississippi; even the idea of traveling somewhere puts me off. This has circumscribed my life’s path, but I’m okay with that.

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

It’s true of anywhere, I suppose, but you must live in Mississippi to understand it, and you must be a native-born resident not only to fully understand it but also to come to appreciate it on its own terms. There’s no other way. Nobody who moves to Mississippi as an adult has the resources, the amassed nuances of life here to know it root and branch. People who have lived here their entire lives can love it despite its darkness. And I’ve never had any expectations of Mississippi; that would be foolish. Mississippi doesn’t figure in to expectations.

Do you ever consider moving away someday? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?

No, I’ll never move away unless for some reason I must, but not for any sense of duty, which is something I don’t have. Loyalty, yes, but not duty. It’s conceivable, perhaps, that if the political situation becomes more oppressive, I might have to leave, but I can’t see that day coming. Not yet, at any rate.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

That poverty, race, and religion make Mississippi what it is. Recognizing the interplay of those three characteristics is the key to answering every “Why?” or “What?” anyone would ever ask about Mississippi. Sounds simple; it isn’t.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

Euphus Ruth’s work has an uncommon aesthetic and exceptional craftsmanship. The images themselves are striking, hauntingly beautiful, some with heart-piercing starkness, others tantalizingly abstruse and nebulous. His light always finds an equilibrium. Ruth’s work falls into Southern Gothic and often skirts the Otherworld. His devotion to the wet-collodion process sharpens his eye for light others should see.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

Given a billion dollars to invest, I would establish a statewide conservancy to purchase land that is threatened by development as well as areas deserving of restoration. These areas would not be established as recreational venues in any capacity, and access to some areas would likely be restricted. The mandate of the conservancy would include every area of the state. Some might deride this enterprise as lacking in social responsibility. I don’t care. Mississippi still has a great deal of outstanding natural beauty, and it deserves protection.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

Visit the Mississippi Sideboard (jesseyancy.com). You can search for articles you might like and browse the photos. Leave a comment. Send me an email. I’d love to hear from you.

Jesse Yancy, a native Mississippian and a graduate of the University of Mississippi, is a writer, gardener, and editor living in Raymond. Yancy publishes articles about food, history, and literature on his blog, Mississippi Sideboard.

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Order THE IRISH GOODBYE

Where are you from?

I was born in New Jersey and raised, from the age of five, in a suburb of Chicago, Lake Forest, IL. I went to college in Indiana (Notre Dame), got my MFA at the Univ. of Arkansas, did a post-doc at Univ. of Wisconsin, and taught for two years in IL before moving to Mississippi.

When did you move to Mississippi and why did you move here?

I moved to Mississippi in August of 2001, with my husband, Tom Franklin, and our first child, who was only five weeks old. Tommy had been offered the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence, a position for an emerging Southern Writer. At the time, I had a tenure-track job at Knox College in Galesburg, IL, so I took maternity leave and we made a temporary move to Oxford, as Tommy’s gig was only supposed to be for nine months. But when we got here we fell in love with Oxford. And a Visiting Assistant Professor position opened up, and I got it, and then a permanent one, and a few years later, a fiction writing position opened up for Tommy. We never did go back to Knox College. We just sent for our things! And that five-week-old baby is now twenty-four, and has two brothers, ages twenty and fourteen.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

What’s interesting about “home” is that you don’t always get to choose it; sometimes it chooses you. I was raised in the Midwest, with prairies and wide expanses and Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, but when I moved to the South for the first time—this was when I went to grad school at the Univ. of Arkansas—I thrilled to the hills and vines and secrets and rot. I’ve given some thought to why I love the South, and different answers have occurred to me, all of which seem to have some nugget of truth. For example, my family heritage is Irish—ancestors on both sides came to the US during the Great Famine—and I think some of the things I love about Irish culture are mirrored in Southern culture, such as story telling and music making, and an emphasis on family. But even that doesn’t fully account for why the South feels like home and has from the jump. Part of it is just the soul selecting her own society.

What do you miss most about the place where you’re from?

I miss being a short train ride from Chicago, a truly great city—the international cuisine, the art museum, the theater, the Cubs, the funky neighborhoods and Chicagoans’ friendly and frank sense of humor and grit. I miss having a dynamic city close by. I love New Orleans, but it’s a five-hour drive.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi?

I like to visit Mississippi schools and get schoolchildren writing poetry—I like to reach them before they’re taught to be scared of poetry—so I think that volunteering has given me a strong pathway for getting to know folks in my state and has allowed me to do work that feels purpose-driven and valuable. My work in the schools, I think, is one reason I was chosen as poet laureate of Mississippi (2016-2021).

But I’d like to tell you about a new initiative, if I may, that I’m proud of—establishing a community reading event. I wanted to do something positive for the town of Oxford, a town I love but worry about, as in my twenty-five years here I’ve seen the town grow too fast, grow unwisely, with over-building and commercialization replacing the literary community. Now, because Oxford has gotten so fashionable, out-of-town folks are buying small houses that had been housing middle-class folks and tearing these houses down to build condos that are in use merely for six football weekends a year. The town has grown less affordable for the creative people, the kind of people that made Oxford an interesting place to live in the first place. Many service workers can’t afford to live in the town where they wait tables. I worry about how this growth harms our community, and I decided that instead of merely complaining, I should do something that would build community and reinforce the idea that literature is a part of the average Oxonian’s life.

I’ve now hosted five BYOB (bring your own book) events in which I invite people to join me for forty-five silent minutes of reading. I have people draw random seat locations so even if they come with a friend they end up sitting with strangers, which is part of the point. Following the reading, each table has a fifteen minute conversation which I facilitate by passing out bookish/reading-related questions to each group.

The first two events were at Exploradora Coffee, in Oxford, but one of my ideas is the keep the event moving around, and always in third spaces—non-academic, non-religious, non-political public places, places where everyone feels welcome. I’ve now also hosted at Lost Dog Coffee in Taylor and T.I.N. in Water Valley, and most recently at The Growler Brew Pub in Oxford, with more of these planned on the horizon.

If anyone reading this is local to the Oxford area and wants to come, reach out to me on Instagram @bethannfennelly and I’ll get you on the mailing list!

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

I’m always surprised by the general ignorance about our state, especially as it pertains to geography. I once had to educate a book publicist in NYC who needed to get an author from Lemuria in Jackson to Square Books in Oxford and thought it would be most expedient to fly this author between those cities. I’ve also mentioned the Mississippi Gulf Coast to folks who were surprised Mississippi touched the ocean.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

One thing I adore about Mississippi in general and Oxford in particular is that it’s a place where people value stories. Mississippians are used to being condescended to about many things, but we still have made an outsized contribution to our national literature—seriously punching above our weight. Because of that, I think Mississippi is a great place to be an author. This is not because we have lavish state funding, but because writers here have cultural currency. We take pride in our celebrated authors. We still have readers here. We still have the feeling that good books matter. I get great students in my classes at the University of Mississippi.

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here?

I didn’t know how many Europeans travel to Mississippi because they love the blues. I’ve met several touring through. Also, I never would have guessed how central tamales are to cuisine here! Or how, in many towns, the best food to be had is served in gas stations.

Have you ever thought about moving away? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?

Nope. Mississippi is my forever home. Proof? My husband and I own five plots in the cemetery, just down the hill from Faulkner. I ain’t going nowhere.

That being said, one way that living in a small town works for me is that I travel a lot for work, giving readings or teaching at various universities. For example, in May I was invited to teach in Switzerland for a week. And that peripatetic part of my life really compliments the small-town life that I have, and makes everything workable.

Also, because I’m in academia, I’ve been able to take sabbaticals in interesting places and expose my children to different cultures. In 2009, I had a Fulbright to Brazil, and Tommy and I got to live there with a semester with our kids. In 2016, Tommy had a fellowship at The American Academy in Berlin. I love being able to raise my kids in a safe small town but keep their eyes open to the world, introduce them to other languages, through these opportunities. During my last sabbatical, we couldn’t travel because I was caring for my mom, who had Alzheimer’s (she passed away last month). But I hope to have one more big adventure before I retire!

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

That a lot of the negative things they’ve heard about our state simply follow from the fact that we’re the poorest state, due to a variety of factors, including institutional racism.

Is there a Mississippi change-maker who you think everyone needs to know about?

A lot of folks know John T. Edge because of his True South show in ESPN, but I’d call people’s attention to the fact that he’s also the genius behind Greenfield Farm, a new writing residency for people to come to Faulkner’s old mule farm, be taken care of, and create Mississippi stories. It’s going to change the literary landscape for our state.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

Lack of funding for education and health holds Mississippians back from the start. I’d pay teachers what they deserve and make pre-school free. How much is a billion dollars? Could I also do free day care and health care for all Mississippians? If so, I’d do that. And if there’s any left over, everyone would get a pony.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

YAY! Thought you’d never ask! My book, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs comes out 2/24!

My background is in poetry, as are my first few books, and for years I never thought I’d want to write anything else. But then I started cheating on poetry with prose, publishing a book of essays and a collaborative novel. I see now that such experimentation was necessary for the discovery I’d make regarding creating a new form: the micro-memoir, an experimental hybrid. Writing micro-memoirs allows me to borrow what I love from different genres: the lyrical concision of poetry, the narrative tension of fiction, and the truth-telling of creative nonfiction.

The micro-memoir, I’ve found, is ideal for explicating the moment—moments from my life as a woman, as a writer, as a wife, as a mother, as a professor, and as a human being walking around on earth. These pieces—some as short as a sentence— dignify the diminutive through the act of attention. They capture the interstitial interactions—encounters with strangers, quirky observations, unexpected flights of fancy—that make up a richly-lived life.

I’ll be doing some readings around the state—and other places like Savannah, New Orleans, and New York. If anyone wants to find me, my events are listed at www.bethannfennelly.com

Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021, teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi where she is a four-time teaching award winner. She’s received grants from the N.E.A., the United States Artists, the Academy of American Poets, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize and three times been included in The Best American Poetry Series. Fennelly has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, and a book of nonfiction, Great with Child, all published with W. W. Norton. A novel she co-authored with her husband, Tom Franklin, called The Tilted World, was published by HarperCollins. Her sixth book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W. W. Norton), was named an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book, a Goodreaders Favorite for 2017, and the winner of the Housatonic Book Prize. Her new book is The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs. Fennelly and Franklin live in Oxford with their three children.

Subscribe now

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Subscribe now

Where are you from?

I’m from Pope—a small town, really more of a village, in Panola County. Blink, and you’ll miss it. But it raised me. Who I am today was shaped and honed there.

My roots in Mississippi are inherited. My roots in Utica were chosen—and tended.

How long have you lived in Mississippi?

All my life.

I’ve traveled, visited, passed through—but Mississippi is the place that made me and keeps claiming me. I always breathe easier when I come home.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

Home is where I don’t have to explain myself.

It’s where people know my people, where land and memory overlap, where the stories don’t need footnotes. Mississippi fits that definition because it holds my personal, communal, and cultural history all at once.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

By showing up—and staying. I could have gone elsewhere, but the work I want to do needs to be done here, where I know who will benefit and who will grow from it.

Community doesn’t come from parachuting in with answers. It grows from listening, working, failing, laughing, and being accountable. Librarians, artists, elders, students, museum folks, rural creatives—people who care about memory and place. Those are my people.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

Most of them are weird. But the one I hear most is: “Why do you still live there? You’re smart enough to live in New York.”

And I always think—I ain’t never lost anything in New York.

Everything I care about is right here.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

It taught me discernment. I stopped apologizing for being from Mississippi a long time ago. Every place has skeletons. Mississippi isn’t the worst state—it’s just been the most visible.

Living here taught me how to read people, systems, and silences. It shaped my sense of responsibility—to history, to truth, and to telling stories that don’t flatten or romanticize this place.

What is something you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

Mississippi will break your heart—and teach you how to mend it.

You can’t understand its contradictions from the outside. Beauty and brutality live side by side here. It has lived up to my expectations by refusing simplicity. You have to pay attention.

Do you ever consider moving away someday? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?

When I was younger? Sure, I thought about leaving.

But this is home. My heartbeat is grounded here. I know the people. I recognize the devils. There’s something to be said for that kind of clarity.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

That Mississippi is not a punchline.

It’s a place of deep culture, intellectual rigor, creativity, and survival. If you only see what’s broken, you’re missing who’s building.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician—or a Mississippi change-maker everyone should know about?

Mississippi is full of them—especially people doing the quiet work. Librarians, teachers, artists, and culture bearers who don’t get headlines but keep communities intact. Those are the folks I’m always watching.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend it?

I’d give most of it away—with intention.

I’d invest heavily in my museum, the Utica Institute Museum and Archives, and in preserving Black educational history. I’d fund scholarships for Black women in journalism at Northwest Community College and Ole Miss, and scholarships for Black women in library and information science at the University of Southern Mississippi. I’d create funding opportunities for small businesses in Utica, support rural artists through Sipp Culture, and help fund rural broadband access.

There’s so much to be done. Money should circulate where people already know how to use it.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote?

The work.

The museums, archives, artists, storytellers, and people keeping memory alive in places most folks overlook. Some histories live in archives. Others live in people. The work is learning how to hear both.

And the idea that older Black women are not finished—we’re just finally speaking plainly.

Jean Greene is a Mississippi cultural historian, community archivist, and storyteller whose work is rooted in Black rural life, memory, and land. A lifelong Mississippian with deep generational ties to the state, she has lived in Utica for twenty-six years, where her work reflects a long-standing commitment to place, community, and historical stewardship. Greene has spent twenty-nine years as a librarian, including nineteen years at Hinds Community College’s Utica Campus, where her work focused on archives, institutional memory, and the preservation of Black educational history. She is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Utica Institute Museum and Archives, guiding community-centered interpretation and public history that honors lived experience alongside documented record. She is the creator of The History, The Legacy, The Promise, a traveling exhibit and teacher guide used across Mississippi to introduce students to the history of Black industrial education. Greene also served as Co-Director of the NEH-funded project William H. Holtzclaw & The Black Man’s Burden, expanding public access to the writings, philosophy, and institutional legacy of the Utica Institute’s founder. Her work extends beyond archives into the present moment. As the writer and producer of the podcast Sips from the ’Sipp, Greene amplifies Mississippi voices, Black creative traditions, and community memory—stories that rarely appear in official histories but shape everyday life. She is currently at work on a hybrid manuscript, This Is Not a Memoir: Truth Cosplaying as Fiction, which weaves personal history, ancestral presence, hoodoo traditions, and Southern Black storytelling. Writing from the lived experience of being the only daughter of two only children raised in rural Jim Crow Mississippi, Greene explores grief, inheritance, identity, and the unseen forces that bind people to place. Greene believes history is alive, land remembers, and truth often speaks quietly—unless you know how to listen.

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

Subscribe now

Where are you from?

I hail from a multi-generational Rocky Mountain family, (my mother Colorado, father British Columbia). Third youngest. My parents pulled themselves and our gang of ten upwards out of the Great Depression, and through the World Wars, the Vietnam War, and the hippy folk decades that followed, and forward into our modern era by the straps of their work boots, with a keen sense of morality and a do-good work ethic in the intimate, magical, and sometimes suffocating ways of a traditional Catholic family. My hometown was separated by social cliches, categorized by “freaks” and “cowboys.” I fit into neither. A misfit. I found my place in the cliffy mountains and clear-running streams.

When did you move to Mississippi and why did you move here?

After high school graduation in 1982, my best friend and I built a 12 x 24’ raft, and set off down the mighty Mississippi River out of the great North Woods of Minnesota, and five months later, in February 1983, we literally crash-landed on the first big island coming out of Tennessee into the state of Mississippi. Cat Island. Right above all the casinos in Tunica County, MS. My first night here in this state was as a muddy Mississippi River rat refugee on Cat Island. Huck and Jim were our role models. We were seeking our freedom in the same place. They found it on the face of the wild free, flowing big river. I’ll have to say, I found the same kind of freedom, and connection to the universe. I never got the mud out of my blood.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

Home is a feeling. Home is where the heart is. When I settled down in Clarksdale, I was following my heart, and it seems like my heart found a place of vitality and wholeness in this strange thriving community in the wilderness of fields and floodplains, here in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. I was welcomed immediately by the people here, and felt a wholesomeness that I never encountered anywhere else. And I still feel to this very day (although since pandemic it seems to have been shaken by the chaos and erratic fluidity of everything).

What do you miss most about the place where you’re from?

I miss the smell of the High Plains desert after a summer rain. I miss the serenity of a three foot snowfall that completely transforms the world. I miss all the public lands and hiking trails. I miss the eruptions of the imagination that blossom in the high altitude environment and in cold weather.

But to be honest, that’s about all. Most of my family remains in the Rockies (or Coastal Ranges of the Pacific Northwest). When I’m in Colorado visiting family, I seem to spend about half my time wondering what’s happening on the banks of the Mississippi river.

Also, the same Colorado neighborhoods that I grew up in have become soul-squelching suburbia, where everyone tries to do exactly what everyone else is doing, and anyone not doing the same gets a lot of weird vibes and look down your nose kind of inspection.

I don’t miss the atmospheric high-society who is crowding native Coloradans like myself right out of their own neighborhoods, who moved into the spectacular Colorado Rockies to find their version of nirvana, something they probably saw in some Rocky Mountain High movie or commercial, or maybe experienced one time on a ski lift, or mid-mountain ski lodge hot tub, some false vision of the promised land, and decided to move because they wanted that for themselves, and then after moving in fell prey to the false promise of the Rocky Mountain High, and get tripped up by their imported selfishness and shallow spiritual goals. When I return to my old neighborhoods, I don’t know anybody. Which is strange. I haven’t been gone but a couple of decades, not even one generation. Even though I see the house I grew up in, it in no way feels homey.

That entire region is suffering from runaway uncontrollable growth — everywhere from Pueblo through Colorado Springs, Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins — The Front Range it’s called. The quaint mountain towns like the one I grew up have become bedroom communities for flat-landers. The neighborhoods are permeated with a self-centered psychosis that breeds paranoia. Combine that with a bloody history of “Indian removal,” and the life where justice is served with a pulled pistol, and vicious shoot-outs. The Sand Creek Massacre is an example of where that leads.

It should come as no surprise when Colorado (and similar picture perfect places) pop up in the evening news with mass shootings. The 1999 Columbine Shooting, for instance, when you see crazed individuals who have no sense of direction or morality. And I think that comes from not living in healthy neighborhoods, like the kind you commonly find in Mississippi, in communities where you feel a responsibility to your fellow citizens and accountability to your community.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

Panny Mayfield and Wesley Jefferson, the “Mississippi Junebug,” were amongst the first people I met here in Clarksdale, and welcomed me immediately into town, and made me feel like I had found a place where I was a part of things, not separate from them. “Junebug” or “Bug” as we called him, became a father figure for me, his deep gritty wisdom was a salve that soothed my restless, itchy tendencies. Uncomfortable in my own skin, always looking for the next place. I became one of his band members. Later, he became my first shuttle driver for Quapaw Canoe Company, and his son Clifton my first Mighty Quapaw apprentice. Clifton coined the name we still use for the apprenticeship — the “Mighty Quapaws.” We sometimes sing a paddling song using lyrics invented by another another one of my young apprentices named “Popeye” (Jeremy Hayes).

I discovered in Clarksdale a lot of parallels, many powerful currents that ran parallel to each other, that don’t necessarily mix, but their proximity to each other seemed to magnify each other. Two of those parallels were the flow of the big muddy Mississippi river alongside the thriving Mississippi Delta blues culture and tradition. And two other parallels were the the new culture arising from the ashes of the Civil Rights era, and the influx of entrepreneurs and creative types, like myself attracted to this community, and finding a place within it.

I’ve experienced a creative freedom here in Clarksdale that I have found nowhere else in the world. I’ve been a gyspsy soul so far in this life. Looking for my home. For perspective, here are the places I had previously laid roots before I settled in Clarksdale: Batopilas Chihuahua, Mexico; Wallingford, CT; Silver City, NM; Sierra Madre, CA; Austin, TX; Santa Fe, NM; Adamant, VT, Valladolid Spain; and my childhood home, Evergreen, CO.

I come from a family of restless souls, modern wanderers, suburban gypsies. (Of course, all humans have some part of that gypsy nature in our blood, that nomadic quality that we all evolved from, the hunter-gatherer, following our prey and harvest of the natural world through regions and seasons). Strange to say I have lived in Clarksdale longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my life. I’ve been here continuously since 1991, so thirty-four years. I am now 62, so that’s now more than half of my life.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

When I first moved here, for good, I mean, in the early 1990s, I thought I found paradise in this strange town found in between the blues and the big river. I became part of the blues scene here, the thriving blues community, playing keyboards with the Wesley Jefferson Southern Soul Band. I lived in the historic Riverside Hotel, where Bessie Smith died in 1937 (when it was the regional African-American Hospital). I was in room #7, also known as the “Robert Nigthhawk” room. I became the first curator of the Delta Blues Museum, under founder Sid Graves. Sometime during that era I returned home to the Rocky Mountains for a family reunion, and I was showing my grandfather photos from my new life. He was shocked. “John!” he exclaimed, “John, those are all Black people!” And I was just as shocked as he was by his ignorance of the contemporary culture of the Mississippi Delta. (Although I shouldn’t have been, because previous to all this, I was equally ignorant).

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

Mississippi has allowed me to be who I am in the most essential aspects of my nature as an artist, and entrepreneur. I don’t think I would’ve been able to fulfill my dreams so fully anywhere else, only here, by the power of the blues and the big river.

They say Clarkdale is the crossroads; signs will lead you to a tourist destination near Abe’s Bar-B-Que US Hwy 61 and 49. Watch out for heavy traffic if you take your guitar there on a full moon night! Not there, but nearby, I discovered a personal crossroads at the intersection of the propulsive procreative power of the Mississippi Delta blues crossing paths with the biggest river in North America, the wild and wonderful Mississippi river, whose pathway carves 44 miles of Coahoma County, and 440 miles of the western border of the state of Mississippi. A fresh and sparkling new landscape laid down by the congealing mud after the melting of the last ice age. Geologically younger than the Rockies. A frontier into the early 1900s, when it was still a jungly forested floodplain 55 million acres big.

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

Until I crash wrecked here, in the early 80s, I always thought of Mississippi as a mysterious dark place, full of shadows and scary places. What I discovered is that it is a mysterious and muddy place, full of shadows — and light. Full of scary places — and welcoming. You can’t truly know one without the other.

(Just like the muddy Mississippi, which, of course created this muddy part of Mississippi that I live in, and that is the muddy Mississippi Delta. So my preconceptions were partly fulfilled, but in a changed way. In the decades since, I have discovered a land and culture full of mysterious muddy motions that cut through many layers at all sorts of levels. A never-ending source of creative inspiration!)

Have you ever thought about moving away? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?

I have great difficulty with the long-term effects of poverty, inequality, flood control, and deforestation. Hot summers getting hotter, and dustier, more chemicals, more exhaust, more smoke. There are some days it really hurts, a terrible aching pain. I’m prone to depression if I don’t get outside. Many times I’ve asked myself what the heck am I doing? Why am I still here? But then I read the news, and look around the rest of the country, and I’m reminded again and again that I am exactly where I am supposed to be, and what a blessing it is to be living in this paradise of wild waters and a wild culture, in a community that breeds individuality and sincerely cares about each person.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

The Mississippi river, from which the state drives its name, exemplifies a flowing quality that is true everywhere, even in deserts and cliffy canyons. When you look at Mississippi from the outside, you get fooled into thinking that it is a location stuck in time, and you forget that everything here is in the process of transformation, and evolution — evolving upwards and forward through the parallel currents of family, community culture — fertilized by the state’s fields and forests, it’s lovely beaches, and lively rivers, and overflowing islands of life, everything in motion and flowing forward. Movies, books and popular culture has Mississippi locked down in Reconstruction, or maybe the Civil Rights era, and usually ignores the forward evolution happening at local level.

Of course, sometimes the flow doubles back on itself, like an oxbow of the Mighty Mississippi. But, like my mentor Johnnie, “Mr. Johnnie” Billington (1935-2013), used to say, “sometimes you gotta take a step backwards before you can go forward again.” (He also told me in the year before he passed that things are gonna get really bad but to keep the faith, and keep moving forward. Because they would get better again. And that we would be part of making that betterment happen.)

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

Yes. For sure. Many. Whew! Difficult choice! I have a whole pile of people I would like to include in this, but I’m gonna focus on a quatrain of living blues musicians here in Clarksdale, the up-and-coming juke joint blues workforce, who most people probably don’t know about, but who are keeping the traditional alive, and are probably the hardest-working quadratic in the thriving threshold of this vigorously bubbling Mississippi Delta blues scene. Namely Anthony “Big A” Sherrod, Lee “Pocketknife” Williams, Walt Busby, and Heather Crosse. They all play together in various configurations of Big A and the All-Stars, and Heavy Suga & the Sweetones. They are amongst the upcoming stars in the next generation, who grew up here, and were all nurtured by local elders (including the aforementioned Mr. Johnnie, but also Josh “Razor Blade” Stewart, James “Super Chikan” Johnson, Big Jack Johnson, Wesley Jefferson, the “Mississippi Junebug,” and Johnny Holmes (Clarksdale musician, brother of Jimmy Duck Holmes, blue front Café, Bentonia).

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

I’ve always been one to give flowers to the living. I would immediately split up all that money into ten thousand packages of $100,000 each, and send it out to people like the four blue stars highlighted above, and hundreds of others here in Clarksdale, and thousands of others across the state — those artistic and creative types were just barely getting by, like most of us here in Clarksdale, living on the poverty line. People who have never been without don’t understand poverty. Simple things like health insurance and a reliable vehicle are really difficult when you’re just barely getting by. Maybe it would be something like a mini McArthur Grant, no strings attached, to go out locally within Mississippi, including struggling but forward-thinking entrepreneurs and librarians, and teachers, and visionary organization leaders like Chandra Williams at Cultural Crossroads, and Ben Lewis, at Meraki, and Rebekah Pleasant-Patterson, Griot Arts leader, and Matt Sutton, with Spring Initiative, and all the other cohort leaders there. And you too, Lauren. And all the visionary writers who are sprouting like trees in the fertile soil, like Addie Citchens and Boyce Upholt.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

Rivergator, the Paddlers Guide to the Lower Mississippi River, is currently found online at Rivergator.org. One million words describing the Lower Mississippi river mile-by-mile from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico, including the Atchafalaya River, and other Gulf Passes and connections. Rivergator is the result of several decades of firsthand experience that started in the 1980s, with my five-month raft trip after high school graduation, but became an intentional project in 2011 thanks to support from the Lower Mississippi River Foundation.

Within the next year, I am hoping to condense everything into a single waterproof hardcopy edition that paddlers can strap down on the top of their kayak, or place in the canoe in front of them on top of a dry bag, and use in person without having to depend on technology. The goal is to create a guide to that mysterious landscape, that watery world created by the biggest body of flowing water in this quadrant of the world.

Rivergator is a guide to the wilderness within. The greatly misunderstood, turbulent waters and ever-changing islands of the big muddy river. Over 2,000,000 acres of bottom land hardwood forest alongside. That’s about the size of Yellowstone National Park. It’s a secret wild place in the heart of the Deep South. Double that adding on the Atchafalaya, River of Trees, and triple that adding on other adjoining protected wetlands like the lower end of the White and Arkansas Rivers.

In 1808 the Czechoslovakian immigrant Zadok Cramer wrote and published a guidebook called The Navigator, which was a guide written for the pioneer Americans who were streaming out of the crowded Atlantic coast, and following the rivers downstream into the frontier. It became a bestseller, and went through many printings. Not coincidentally alongside the era of steamboat navigation, which brought a new layer of accessibility to everyone who previously was using flat boats, keelboats, and of course rafts and canoes. Canoes are perhaps the oldest form of elegant water transportation in the history of humans. 8,000 years old at least. Archaeologists who study canoes think that it’s at least double that.

The tragic side of that story is the dislocation of indigenous cultures, like the Quapaw and Choctaw and Chickasaw, and dozens of other tribes and nations, who were forced out of their homelands, and made to march West into Oklahoma, mostly along the brutal routes of the infamous Trail of Tears.

But the Rivergator seeks to re-balance the divide between all of us Homo sapiens — and also all the rest of creation, for a sustainable and harmonious future for all, as we travel forward through time across this endlessly, evolving and wonderful, and often destructive, but always procreative, universe of ours. In the way that the first people here envisioned the earth, and that is a land shared by all beings, and shared in the way that our creator intended us to do. It’s all a matter of biology. Coyotes and Beavers do it. Ants and Monarch Butterflies. Geese and Swallows. Turtles and Frogs. Cooperation for the good of the colony, of the community. We do the same in our canoes, and during our summer camps, and on our remote wild islands. Because ultimately this is the only possible future for a healthy mother earth.

Also, shout out to the Quapaw Canoe Company. I need help keeping it alive. I’ve been running it for twenty-eight years now, and I am starting to stumble in my old age. I am the old turtle on the muddy river bank. Provenance. I need someone to come and take it over, and carry it onwards, in ways that I can only dream of.

Since the pandemic, we have entered a strange new world. Meanwhile over the levee, and over the bluff, life flows along pretty much the same as it always has. And that is, with the qualities that create the best of who we are as humans — in the sense of our spirits, our ethics and our morals. On the river we all share in the same meals, sleep in the same tents, and drink from the same jugs of water. We all paddle together across the big waters to reach the paradise-like islands of the big river. We are visitors to a land already inhabited by other layers of creation, and with whom we share our great mother earth.

We Mighty Quapaws are the Worker Bees of our Queen Mississippi. We seek diversity in our adventures and explorations using our big canoes, where a pure kind of democracy is exercised, and where all of creation has a chance not only to breathe, but to thrive. Not just us Homo Sapiens — we are but one species — but all of creation. All twenty-five million species of us and counting, from Least Tern to the Louisiana Black Bear, from Skinks and Salamanders to Squirrels and Skunks.

We all live on the same earth, we all drink the same water, we all breathe the same air. All 25 million of us. Of which us human kind are but one. We have one vote out of 25 million. (Note: official count is currently 8.7 million species. But species biologists believe it to be triple that).

There are 25 million of us paddling this most giant of canoes we call our dear planet mother earth, as we make the most epic of all journeys, and that is the journey of history and evolution across the endless depths and wonders of the universe. And so we must all learn to paddle together, one stroke at a time, and to please one other.

And this is the most humbling — and exciting challenge — of all.

John Ruskey is a worker bee in the colony of his Queen, the Mississippi River. He is the author of the Wild Miles (www.wildmiles.org) and the Rivergator: Paddler's Guide to the Lower Mississippi River (www.rivergator.org). John was the first curator of the Delta Blues Museum (1992-98) and is co-founder of the Delta Blues Education Fund. In 1998 he founded the Mighty Quapaws Apprenticeship Program for the youth of the Mississippi Delta. In 2011 he founded the Lower Mississippi River Foundation for access, education, and the betterment of public outdoor recreation on the Middle & Lower Mississippi Rivers. He is owner and founder of the Quapaw Canoe Company, which will celebrate its 28th anniversary in 2026, and provides guiding & outfitting to the raw wild power & beauty of the Mississippi River, range extends from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico. He is founding member of One Mississippi. In 2019 John was awarded the Noel Polk Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters: “Through his writing, his music, his watercolors, his environmental efforts, his work with young Mississippians, and his knowledge of Mississippi’s great river.” In 2022 John was awarded the St. John’s College Award of Merit for distinguished and meritorious service to the United States, to the Mississippi River, and for “outstanding achievement in the arts and exploration.” John was the SBA 2024 Small Business Person of the Year Award for the State of Mississippi.

One year ago:

Two years ago:

Three years ago:

SOUTHERN WOMEN, SOUTHERN LANDSCAPES

Where are you from?

I grew up in Tallahassee in north Florida, definitely part of the Deep South and with a lot of similarities to Mississippi, in the culture, weather, and accents.

When did you move to Mississippi and why did you move here?

We moved here in 1985 because my husband got a job teaching philosophy and religious studies at Millsaps, and in the next few years I joined him on the faculty as an art historian.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

I feel very at home in the South, growing up in north Florida, traveling often to visit grandparents in South Carolina, and going to grad schools in Tennessee and North Carolina. In Tallahassee I felt more connected to the diverse culture of FSU, where my father worked, but my experiences in the public schools, especially my high school as it was integrating, connected me to southern prejudices as well as resistance movements. So in many ways I’ve been deeply immersed in southern culture almost my whole life—its language and daily rhythms, the impact of religious traditions, the social norms. I remember my mother using a classic southern indirection to be polite, asking “Won’t you have a roll?” when she clearly meant “Please pass me the rolls” (though in other ways she was one of the most wonderfully direct women I’ve ever known!). But here I am not answering your question (another form of indirection and deflection!).

Feeling at home, for me, is feeling like I know the language—literally, how to speak to people around me, being clear without offending, but also more generally, how to carry on a friendly conversation with just about any stranger and arrive at some kind of connection. I remember missing those seemingly no-count little conversations when we lived for a while in Amsterdam and Brussels—also missing thunderstorms! That’s another Southern treat for me: feeling at home in the weather, feeling at home in my garden’s dirt.

What do you miss most about the place where you’re from?

I miss the beautiful clear rivers that my family used to canoe on – the Wakulla, the Wacissa, the Sopchoppy . . .

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

“Rooted” makes me think of plant roots—not surprising for a gardener! But I wasn’t a real dirt gardener until I came here. Before that my love of plants was mostly from books. But being rooted means more than that, of course. Teaching at Millsaps gave me an instant community—colleagues among the faculty and staff, my students, and alumni who stay in touch. But friends among public school parents and teachers have also been important, and more recently, friends at the MS Museum of Art and the Wolfe studio, fellow weeders in the Welty garden, and new friends I’ve met during protests. Mississippi is full of good-hearted and interesting people!

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

One person thought we lived up by the Great Lakes—confusing us with one of those other M states! But more seriously and distressingly, the general response of pity when I mentioned where I taught to people at academic conferences and their assumption that I must be actively searching for jobs elsewhere.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

This is a complicated question—for many of your Rooted writers, I’m sure! I’ve matured a lot, becoming more confident and able to follow through on a range of interests and curiosities, both professionally (thank you, Millsaps!) and personally (thank you, family and friends!). I’ve also become more political, for better or worse. It’s possible that all of that would have happened anywhere I lived and worked, of course, but I think Mississippi was a fruitful testing ground for me—a sort of petri dish, I guess, allowing me to flourish.

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

Before moving here my only experience with Mississippi was when we traveled on summer camping trips out West, and I just thought of it and Texas as places to drive through quickly in our hot, un-airconditioned car before we made it to the mountains. Our first couple of years here we lived in a little house on campus, so it took a while to feel like I was becoming part of Mississippi in any real sense. At first, living on campus, my sense of Mississippi was at one remove, through conversations with faculty who had been (and continued to be) active in the civil rights movements: T.W. Lewis, especially. I learned a lot from them, but I think the importance of public schools for our children was especially crucial in introducing me to Mississippi culture and politics. So the main thing I’ve learned is that this state is chock full of people who care deeply about social justice and human rights but also see what hard work it is—hard like trying to garden in heavy clay soil! When we moved off campus into the house we still live in, I’d brought plants in pots, so excited to get them in the ground. But it was August, and when I tried to dig a hole the soil was so hard I couldn’t even get the shovel to make a dent. There’s an important life lesson in there somewhere!

Have you ever thought about moving away? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?

Yes, when we first came in the mid ‘80s we thought we might stay for a few years and then move on, but we soon realized that we actually really liked being here. It was small enough to feel easily connected to people and places, and we were very lucky to both have teaching positions at the same wonderful college. Mississippi’s problems were (are!) obvious, but there were (are!) plenty of people actively working to make things better.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

Our problems are your problems. Our confusions and uncertainties are yours. Our joys are your joys.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

Oh, so many! Margaret Walker and Eudora Welty of a previous generation, and Jesmyn Ward and Kiese Laymon well-established now, and Addie Citchens whose remarkable Dominion I recently finished. But also Katy Simpson Smith and Matthew Clark Smith, both writers in my own family! I also love the artwork of Sue Carrie Drummond and Mathew Puckett, and could go on and on but will stop there.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

Education at all levels, from plentiful, excellent daycare and public schools to affordable colleges and universities. Also affordable health care—and support for artists of all sorts!

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

Well, I’ve got a book coming out this month, co-authored with my dear friend Judy Page: Southern Women, Southern Landscapes: Cultural Reflections on the Garden, 1870-1970 (University Press of Mississippi). But I also want to mention the Wolfe Creative Legacy, a wonderful group led by daniel johnson, working with Bebe Wolfe and David Weidemann to preserve and maintain the Wolfe property in Jackson and the studio, dojo, and archives there for future use: thewolfecreativelegacy.org/

Elise Smith received her M.A. from Vanderbilt and her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, both in art history, and she is now retired after 37 years at Millsaps College. Her first two books were on individual artists, Lucas van Leyden and Evelyn De Morgan; the next two, co-authored with a literary scholar at the University of Florida, Judith Page, explore the garden as a personal and professional space for British artists and writers. Their third book is focused on gardening women in the American South, 1870-1970.

Where are you from?

I was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi and lived my entire life between Clarksdale and Jackson, Mississippi. My mother is from Clarksdale. My pops is from Jackson, and they met at Jackson State University in 1968.

How long have you lived in Mississippi?

I have lived in Mississippi my entire life, which is 53 years.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

Home is the place where one receives a foundation and blueprint of one’s personal and communal self, which teaches one’s worth, beauty, power, and possibility, with the comfort of remaining a haven for where one can take refuge when necessary. Mississippi, despite its horrible history of white supremacy, has been all of this for me because of the Afro-Mississippians who taught me to love myself by loving the culture that produced me.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

Community was cultivated for me early by my parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and community people who simply loved me unconditionally while displaying the genius of blackness daily. This early existence gave me the understanding that I was of worth and had the ability and right to pursue whatever I desired. Additionally, my parents shared their love of the arts with me, and I gravitated to music and literature with creative writing (poetry and short stories) becoming my primary loves. By the time I got to college, I began to seek other folks who identified as writers with whom to commune, and those have been the people who have made me feel most rooted here. However, I must mention my pops’s lifelong work as a civil rights activist and later political party executive. This rooted me in the history of activism, which continues to inform my writing.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

As someone who has traveled much of the United States, I get the general assumption that Mississippians are not as smart as everyone else. Yet, I get the same question asked in varying ways: “What’s Mississippi like?” Then, they often take two steps back so I don’t get any of that Mississippi on them as I’m answering the question. After so many years of being asked the question, I finally wrote my poem, “Mississippi Like…” as an answer, and that seems to satisfy the question.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

I don’t know or really care how different my life would have been if I had lived somewhere else, so it’s difficult for me to answer the question. Despite the past and current evil of Mississippi white oppression, I’ve been very blessed to have family and community people who loved and nurtured me into an independent person. Culturally, I have a great work ethic because I was raised by people who believed that the only thing that’s in bed after 8 a.m. is a sorry-ass man. So, I’ve chopped cotton, mowed yards, painted houses, shelled peas, shucked corn, gutted hogs, hunted, fished, and played sports all as activities to prepare me to be a self-sufficient being. I was taught to use my head and my hands to craft the world that I wanted to have.

The adults who raised me didn’t differentiate or value university studies over skilled labor. They were presented as equally necessary for the liberation struggle. I wasn’t forced to choose between Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, or Marcus Garvey. I was taught to take the best of each ideology and amalgamate a plan of action for my people. I don’t know if that’s exclusive to Mississippi. But, being equally exposed to farmers, construction workers, doctors, lawyers, and teachers who all owned businesses gave me a holistic sense of my people and myself to know I am all I need and that black people are all we need to make our situation better.

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

Some of the greatest musicians, writers, and scholars come from Mississippi. Yet, sadly, there is a new generation that does not know this because we no longer do a good job of celebrating who we are. Additionally, people living outside Mississippi don’t know that the state consists of three different landmasses or terrains (Delta, Pine Belt, Gulf Coast), which produces three distinct cultures, showing that Mississippians, especially Afro-Mississippians, are not a monolith. To this point, Mississippi has given me everything that I need to survive and thrive even while missing so many opportunities to be the vanguard state that we have the ability to be.

Do you ever consider moving away someday? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here?  Do you have a “tipping point”?

I never considered moving because I love it here. I do have a sense of duty as a writer to continue the great tradition of Mississippi literature. But, my love for Mississippi blues, literature, and HBCU culture is what kept me here. Also, since I was able to earn a living here, I wasn’t forced to leave for employment.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

People should know that the vast majority of Mississippi’s problems are rooted in the desire of racist whites to maintain the Confederacy. When Afro-Mississippians travel the country, non-Mississippians treat us like we are the cause of Mississippi’s issues. The blame for just about all of Mississippi’s issues is white supremacy and the desire of those who are still fighting the Civil War.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

There are too many to mention here, but a few are: Richard Wright, Margaret Walker Alexander, Etheridge Knight, Jerry W. Ward, Charlie Braxton, Jimmy Kimbrell, Kiese Laymon, Jesymn Ward, Natasha Trethewey, Angie Thomas, B. B. King, Compozitionz, Lester Young, Bo Diddly, Sam Cooke, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Son House, Ike Turner, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Rogers, Charley Pride, Big Joe Williams, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi John Hurt, Charlie Patton, Rufus Thomas, Jim Henson, Morgan Freeman, Freedom, Wynd Chimes, The Chambers Brothers, and more. Obviously, most of these people are famous, but many don’t know that they are from Mississippi.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

I would invest equally in arts and STEM, parenting classes, funding/training support for black-owned businesses, HBCUs, and a literary journal that specializes in Afro-Mississippi writers.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

The current biggest project is the upcoming Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival curated by the Jackson State University Margaret Walker Alexander Center, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival, which was organized by Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander to celebrate the bicentennial of Wheatley’s collection of poetry. That festival is still hailed as one of the greatest gatherings of black female creatives and scholars, and the upcoming celebration November 1–4, 2023, will include seven of the ten living original participants with some of today’s top black female creatives and scholars. For more information, folks can go to the Jackson State website at https://www.jsums.edu/philliswheatley/. 

Other than that, folks can visit my website, Psychedelic Literature, and my YouTube page, @PsychedelicLiterature, to see my books, other writings and video presentations. They can also email me (psychedeliclit@bellsouth.net) to receive my weekly newsletter, which showcases the local and national intersection of African-American art, especially African-American literary art, with a socio-political focus. It generally begins with a commentary (sometimes serious and sometimes silly) by me that is followed by updates about local and national literary and other artistic events involving Afro-Mississippians and African-American artists.

C. Liegh McInnis is a poet, short story writer, Prince scholar, retired instructor of English at Jackson State University, the former publisher and editor of Black Magnolias Literary Journal, and the author of eight books, including four collections of poetry, one collection of short fiction (Scripts:  Sketches and Tales of Urban Mississippi), one work of literary criticism (The Lyrics of Prince:  A Literary Look at a Creative, Musical Poet, Philosopher, and Storyteller), and one co-authored work, Brother Hollis:  The Sankofa of a Movement Man, which discusses the life of a legendary Mississippi Civil Rights icon.  He is also a former First Runner-Up of the Amiri Baraka/Sonia Sanchez Poetry Award sponsored by North Carolina State A&T and edited the Black Magnolias Special Prince Issue.  He has presented papers at national conferences, such as College Language Association, the National Council of Black Studies, the Neo-Griot Conference, and the Black Arts Movement Festival, and his work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Obsidian, Tribes, The Southern Quarterly, Konch Magazine, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Journal of Popular Music and Society, Down to the Dark River:  An Anthology of Poems on the Mississippi River,  Black Hollywood Unchained:  Essays about Hollywood’s Portrayal of African Americans,  Black Panther: Paradigm Shift or Not? A Collection of Reviews and Essays on the Blockbuster Film, Asymptote, The Pierian, Black Gold:  An Anthology of Black Poetry, Sable, New Delta Review, The Black World Today, In Motion Magazine, MultiCultural Review, A Deeper Shade, New Laurel Review, ChickenBones, Oxford American, Journal of Ethnic American Literature, B. K. Nation, Red Ochre Lit, and Brick Street Press Anthology.  In January of 2009, C. Liegh, along with eight other poets, was invited by the NAACP to read poetry in Washington, DC, for their Inaugural Poetry Reading celebrating the election of President Barack Obama.  He has also been invited by colleges and libraries all over the country to read his poetry and fiction and to lecture on various topics, such as creative writing and various aspects of African American literature, music, and history.

Where are you from?

Jackson, Mississippi

How long have you lived in Mississippi?

I'm Mississippi-born and Mississippi-bred, and when I die, I'll be Mississippi-dead. Growing up in the Shady Oaks neighborhood of Jackson, my childhood was filled with unique experiences. I remember the joy of walking to Grove Park, the excitement of chasing down the ice cream truck for a cool treat, and the thrill of climbing the magnolia tree in my front yard.

What does "home" mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

To me, "Home" is more than a physical place. It's a feeling of comfort, belonging, and connection. In Mississippi, I feel safe and accepted, where I can genuinely be myself. It's where I have deep roots and cherished memories, where I've experienced both the joys and challenges of life. Mississippi is not only a place; it's a community that has shaped my identity and holds a special place in my heart.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

I've cultivated community in Mississippi by discovering who I am, growing where I am, and encouraging others to do the same. From my first job to my current role and everywhere in between, it was for a purpose. There have been numerous opportunities to work or volunteer in places where who I am is embraced. Community is cultivated from my church, Jackson Revival Center Church. For over twenty-five years, I’ve grown, my children have grown, and through every accomplishment and disappointment, my church family has been right there with me.

Another one of my favorite places is Lemuria Books. Anytime I stop into Lemuria, I can always have a "what are you reading chat" with one of the booksellers. You can also find me in Oz, the children's section of Lemuria, or somewhere in the store reading during a monthly Storytime.

What's the weirdest question or assumption you've encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who's never been here?

The weirdest assumption is that there is nothing to do. My rebuttal is always to ask what "do" means to you. Doing involves connecting with people who enjoy the same experiences. The advice I always share with middle schoolers is that if you can't find your group, start the group, and they will find you.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life's path?

I don't believe I could have lived anywhere that would not have allowed me to become who I am. While working in a corporate setting as a young adult, coworkers and I often volunteered for different community projects. Volunteering was never seen as a chore but an inherent part of who we are as Mississippians. I eventually left the corporate world and started working for nonprofit organizations. It has been one of the most rewarding adventures ever. Over 20 years later, the joy of working in the community remains.

What is something that you've learned about Mississippi only by living here?

One thing that sets Mississippi apart is the unwavering support we show for each other. In times of need, we don't wait for details; we show up and get to work. As Marshall Ramsay beautifully puts it in his book Chainsaws and Casseroles, “When a disaster strikes, before you can even crawl out of the rubble, there's a church van in your front yard, filled with people armed with chainsaws and casseroles. They'll clear the trees off your house and then feed you.”

In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

We show up for each other time and time again. We offer more than just physical help; we offer emotional support, a shoulder to lean on, and a lap for babies to crawl on. This resilience and supportiveness is what makes Mississippians truly special.

Do you ever consider moving away someday? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a "tipping point"?

Yes, but moving away is a fleeting thought that rarely comes. My tipping point would be when every need for every child in Mississippi is met. And, of course, this includes every child having a home library filled with books of their choosing.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

Some of the most creative people in the world have roots in Mississippi. When people focus on Mississippi being at the bottom of every list, I ask when they last read a book, attended a concert, visited a museum, or attended a sporting event. We top those lists because someone from Mississippi is at the forefront and behind the scenes, ensuring their experience is memorable.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

It is impossible to name a favorite, but two writers more people need to know about are Angie Thomas and Kiese Laymon. After reading Thomas's Concrete Rose and Laymon's Heavy, I've recommended both to youth, parents, and policymakers as required reading. For me, Heavy became a conversation piece with friends and colleagues to check misguided assumptions and fuel intentional and positive interactions with youth. In Concrete Rose, Thomas illuminates that so many young men can be saved by engaging in courageous conversations that point toward a promising future, allowing them to reach their eighteenth birthday and beyond. The way Thomas and Laymon share through both books should encourage us all to move intentionally to support and share space with youth whose experiences may not be the same as ours.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

I would invest in community-based programs for pre-teens through high school. When it comes to providing tools to youth, this must be done intentionally to meet their needs rather than what adults think it should be based on experiences twenty plus years ago. When we provide the support needed, the changes we want to see in our communities will be there. I love all things books and working with youth. For a few years, I was able to couple my two loves with a middle school literary club, not your ordinary book club. Youth who were reluctant readers grew to love engaging with books while learning social and organizational skills. 

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you're working on, or something you are involved in.)

Follow me on Instagram at @tonjareadstoo. I have fun sharing inspirational and sometimes dancing offbeat videos. You can also find book reviews. From middle grade and YA to memoirs, I love sharing thoughts on what I'm reading. 

Tonja Murphy is more than just an author, motivational speaker, and Founder of The Ladybug Club. She was born and raised in Jackson, MS, and her love for dancing to her offbeat inner drum is a testament to her unique spirit. Her nonprofit career is marked by the successful development and implementation of youth-centered programs, a reflection of her passion for making a difference. Tonja loves reading and writing and is a self-crowned Crockpot Queen.

Where are you from?

Greenwood

How long have you lived in Mississippi?

Always. I grew up in the Delta, then Jackson since age 18, bisected by four years on the Gulf Coast in Pass Christian and Biloxi in my twenties.

What does home mean to you?

A space that you get, and it gets you—at least enough of the time. You know you’re home when your sense of being and insides exhale, and your body unthinkingly sinks into the moment. Home can happen inside your actual home or in the other ways too—being with your people, being outside or sometimes while being caught up inside your own head. 

How does Mississippi meet that definition?

There’s layered back story that comes with almost everything here, a reality that you and everyone around you realize. Mississippi is a living organism, I think. It pulses with people I love, time, nature, community, hope, hurt, creativity and all the associated intersections.

I love the cycle to how life happens here—like Joni Mitchell’s song “The Circle Game.” January starts with a pot of black-eyed peas while simultaneously holding vague hopes that somehow this will be the year the Mississippi Legislature does something humane and historical. Then comes February with lipstick-red camellias, an inevitable freeze and the outer bands of New Orleans Mardi Gras. Also by then the Legislature has broken your heart for yet another session and probably made national news over some grotesque bill plus the headline-making associated quotes. The quotes will come from a white lawmaker. Then comes March and the open-air magenta floor show of azaleas in every front yard and bank branch parking lot. Your heart breaks again, but this time it’s over the lavish casual beauty everywhere and not solely the lavish callousness of the majority at the Capitol. Then there’s spring and summer—you get the idea.

Fall goes fast: Mississippi football teams and the New Orleans Saints. Then Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur—I’m Episcopalian and my partner is Jewish—yellow slanted sunlight in October and piercing blue skies. Trick or Treaters on my block in Jackson’s Leftover neighborhood (named because we’re adjacent to top-drawer Eastover, but we’re so not Eastover). Going to Mistletoe Marketplace in early November and seeing people you haven’t seen in a minute along with pretty much every church bus with a working engine in the state. Then orchestrating Thanksgiving and Christmas, now more complicated since my two daughters, like so many other Mississippi-born millennials, left the state after college. That’s a hard part of Mississippi, to know what’s home for me doesn’t seem a fit nor even advisable for too many Mississippi-born millennials. Then back to the New Year’s black-eyed peas, and the cycle starts back around.  

Did that all that sound saccharine? Yes it did. I have digital backup, though. The FitBit says my pulse relaxes here at home on a plain old day in a way it doesn’t elsewhere. Also, last time I did a word cloud quiz on Facebook, my most frequent word was Mississippi.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi?

Mississippi is a good match for anyone like me who’s a sucker for community. I crave connection and always try for it in the sub-communities in my life: as a newspaper reporter, leading writing workshops through Mississippi University for Women and Millsaps College, as a parent, at my church, in Junior League (Eudora Welty was a member too) and in my recent idea The Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools. The nonprofit online truth-telling platform publishes first-person stories from all-white academies and public schools since 1970s integration. For me, it’s personal, since I’m an alum of Pillow Academy in Greenwood and participated in this history. It’s history that diminishes Mississippi public education to this day. The site accounts are primary documents of history, as well as serving as a public space to reflect on how three generations of too-often racially polarized schools damage our sense of community and state government’s willingness to fully funding public education. Check the stories out at www.admissionsprojects.com, and talk to me about writing your story for the site.

Awareness of others and questions about community are a point of my memoir, The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning. The spine of the story is a running series of four essays on my life as a volunteer through eras of my life, starting as a Greenwood teenager. What did the jobs say about me and about what the culture at the time thought females should do as good deeds? In the book, I come to see I dealt with the low-hanging fruit of caring. Meanwhile, there was something more fundamental to Mississippi and to my own history that I could take on: talking about whiteness and the history that I had participated in, including the rise of the segregation academies. So, The Admissions Project.

Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

I have my cousin Alice and friends who go back. Some of us met as fellow Jackson parents of preschoolers—preschoolers who are now adults. Four Greenwood friends since around age six get together multiple times a year. The Greenwood quartet represents 242 years of friendship. When the eight Jackson parent friends got together recently, I did the same calculator run, coming up with 272 years of friendship. That’s a humbling fact in this world, no matter where you live.

Also important, though, is getting to meet new arrivals, especially young ones who’ve moved here trying Mississippi on for size. They inspire me too—looking at you, Lauren Rhoades (creator of Rooted). Lauren and I first met through the Millsaps community writing workshop. Recent transplants find their way to every session of the workshop course, and hopefully we stay in touch.

My partner Myron is from the New Orleans area, in fact, so it’s also interesting seeing Mississippi through his impression. He loves the Mississippi energy, how it’s a few notches less hurried and people make more of a point to take time to get together with friends. You learn by seeing Mississippi through new eyes. That stimulates a root system, too.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

Smug comments from those outside the state about how Mississippi and Mississippians deserve everything bad coming to them because hard-right elected Mississippi white leaders fight federal assistance programs and foster fake culture wars instead. That disdain is as cruel as the agendas of the politicians they condemn. It also erases the existence of the forty-six percent or so of Mississippians who vote against candidates like those Every. Single. Election. If snide non-Mississippi critics want to be constructive, support the many Mississippians working for better on the ground. And consider moving your progressive selves here where your vote and efforts will make a difference. 

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

You are simply drawn into community in Mississippi, like it or not. It comes out of the agrarian DNA, I think, the expectation of getting to know those around you. In a rural place, a neighbor support system could be a life or crop saver, besides companionship. In the present, that Mississippi urge to connect lingers as muscle memory. I’m Pavlov’s dog that way. As much as I’m happy in my own head and a basic introvert, you can’t live in Mississippi long before you get that you are part of a wider web. That said, the failure to take the idea of community to its widest level in public policy is the ironic Mississippi failure. The Hospitality State can be so un-hospitable to its own. 

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here?

That a defining but overlooked trait of how things unfold here comes from how relatively small the state is. If you are a lifer like me, you will run into acquaintance interconnections in lots of events. Things can turn due to personal relationships. Don’t burn a bridge, not just because it’s uncalled-for bad karma, but because, pragmatically, you likely will come across any person again in another capacity. I started thinking about the interconnected life here when listening to my dear hero the late journalist Bill Minor tell his stories.

Here’s a pivotal example: After jury selection at the trial for the Neshoba County civil rights workers’ 1964 murders, Bill was eating at a table of other reporters at Weidmann’s Restaurant in Meridian. Judge Harold Cox was eating at another table. Cox called Bill over. “Do you know anyone on the jury?” the judge asked Bill. Langdon Anderson, Bill told him. The Lumberton oil man was on the state industrial development board. Bill had spotted him on the panel.

Next morning, Cox picked Anderson as jury foreman. National eyes were on the trial, and the notoriously racist and irritable Cox was actually conducting the trial by the book. The eventual guilty verdict marked a milestone in state history with white men convicted in the death of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. Eventually, the workings inside the jury came out publicly. Anderson’s insistence during the deliberations likely made the difference in persuading jurors to bring the guilty vote.

What if Weidmann’s wasn’t the one spot in Meridian both Cox and Bill picked for lunch? What if Bill hadn’t remembered Anderson and had watched him closely enough to sense that with Anderson’s New England family background and Episcopal layman views that he just might do the right thing? What if Anderson hadn’t argued so hard for other jurors to make a guilty vote? History hinged on one person’s connection to another.

 In my own experience, whether doing a cold call to research a story or navigate life admin, I’ll realize I actually do have a connection to the person on the other end of the telephone. It’s standard operating procedure to engage in the Do You Know So-and-So? drill when meeting someone from a town or organization where you have a friend or great aunt. It will make a difference if you bingo on a mutual friend or in-law.

Do you ever consider moving away someday? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here?  Do you have a “tipping point”?

If I felt the time had come, I’d consider moving, but it hasn’t yet. My life, including as a writer, has always been based here. Confession: I do that time-tested Mississippi practice of heading to New Orleans to blow off steam. I think Tennessee Williams said he felt like a bird released from his cage there. Welty wrote about that suspension of regular behavior that happens on New Orleans visits in her short story “No Place For You, My Love.” Hiding out a little in New Orleans from time to time is a Mississippi tradition when you have a tank of gas.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

That the rest of the country is Mississippi too. It’s just that everything American is easy to see here, both the good, the callous and what whiteness looks like. Mississippi’s superpower is being an easy-read of most aspects of the country. That means you see America at its worst in Mississippi’s legacy of racism and white supremacy. You also see the nation at its best through Mississippi-born leaders for justice like Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar and Myrlie Evers. Medgar Evers said, "I love Mississippi, and one day not only will it be a better place in which to live, but it will be the best place in America to live." Mississippians like Macarthur geniuses Kiese Laymon and Jesmyn Ward and Pulitzer winner Natasha Trethewey are at the current height of U.S. literature, writing modern classics about what being human means.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

Richard Wright and his 1945 memoir Black Boy. Not that the work isn’t regarded as one of the world’s great memoirs, but I think about how the boyhood he describes happened in Jackson about six miles from my house. I wrote a piece for Oxford American magazine in 2010 about how he and Welty never met, yet were born within twelve months of each other and grew up only blocks apart in Jackson. The parallels continued when both were U.S. literary stars by 1940. Wright’s family’s house in Jackson is no longer standing, unlike Welty’s. Wright left the U.S. for Paris in 1946 and died there in late 1960. When his daughter came to Mississippi for the centennial of his birth in 2008, she said that when she was growing up, he didn’t talk much about his life in Mississippi. He moved to Memphis when he was seventeen, then Chicago and then New York. Yet in the eighteen months before his death in Paris in late 1960, as he obsessively wrote about four thousand haikus, he marshalled Mississippi imagery for many: cockleburs in a young boy’s hair and the juice of a green melon when it breaks open, for example. There’s no Wright home to visit in Jackson, but you can stand outside his apartment building at 14 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince on the Left Bank in Paris. There’s a plaque to him on the building: THE BLACK AMERICAN MAN OF LETTERS RICHARD WRIGHT LIVED IN THIS BUILDING FROM 1948 UNTIL 1959. 

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

As with pretty much everyone else you’ve asked, it would go to strengthening public schools and public school children, giving the message that their education and well-being are our top concern, our resources spent accordingly. While we’re at it, if I had two billion, I’d put another billion toward every town in Mississippi having a vibrant first-rate library with internet capacity for everyone who wants it, spreading the same message of support about learning and flourishing at all ages.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

If I can be shameless, then I’ll talk about two: The Admissions Projects (www.admissionsprojects.com) and my memoir The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning. If you don’t want to read The Steps We Take, consider buying it for the beautiful stunning cover: a 1943 self-portrait by Mississippi expressionist Dusti Bongé, who showed at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York at mid-century as did Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. She resisted pressure from Betty Parsons to paint from a New York base for more public visibility. Bongé cared about her art, not fame, so she chose to paint from Biloxi from the 1930s until near her death in 1993. 

Ellen Ann Fentress is a journalist, filmmaker, and podcaster. She produced and directed Eyes on Mississippi, a 2016 documentary on iconic civil rights journalist Wilson F. Minor that has screened at universities and institutions across the country. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, The Baffler, Oxford American, Scalawag, storySouth, and New Madrid, as well as on Mississippi public radio, where she was a reporter.