The Welty Prize

Each year Mississippi University for Women and the University Press of Mississippi collaborate to award the Welty Prize for a book of scholarship on Women's Studies, Southern Studies, or Modern Letters—prize winning manuscripts have often combined all three of these areas. Manuscripts must be accepted for publication by University Press of Mississippi through their regular submission process before being eligible for the prize. Those manuscripts deemed appropriate for the prize are sent to the university for final judging by a faculty panel, and the winner is published by the press and invited to speak at the Eudora Welty Writers' Symposium in October. The first prize was awarded in 1990 and a prize has been awarded each year since, with the exception of two years when a fitting manuscript was not published. Mississippi University for Women is proud to honor the exceptional work of the University Press of Mississippi and to promote scholarship in the fields of Women's Studies, Southern Studies, and Literature through this prize in honor of its most famous alumna, Eudora Welty.

Paramount in Eudora Welty as Photographer are the photographs themselves. Only nine have been published previously. The accompanying essays--by Welty scholar Pearl Amelia McHaney; by chief curator of photography at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Sandra S. Phillips; and by photographer and photography historian Deborah Willis--describe Welty's developing aesthetic and her representations of the world as illustrated by the photographs. Welty took photographs of people, animals, patterns, shadows, and structures--natural and man-made--in Mississippi, Louisiana, New York, and North Carolina. The photographs are paired to contrast and complement, to surprise and suggest, and to please and provoke.

Confronting Modernity examines how the conflicts and benefits of modernity's nationalizing influences were reflected and resisted by the state's artists in the first half of the twentieth century. In Louisiana, such change not only produced the turbulent politics of the Huey Long era but also provoked debate over new ideas on art and social roles for artists. Artist Ellsworth Woodward and writer Lyle Saxon battled to retain artistic control over what they considered the exceptional character of Louisiana. Woodward defended localized assumptions through art in the world-renowned pottery program he established in 1892 and directed for more than forty years at Sophie Newcomb College. Saxon, on the other hand, fought against modernity's encroachment from within, serving as director of the Federal Writers Project in Louisiana.

In 1960, Jon Edgar and Louise "Gypsy Lou" Webb founded Loujon Press on Royal Street in New Orleans's French Quarter. The small publishing house quickly became a giant. Heralded by the Village Voice and the New York Times as one of the best of its day, the Outsider, the press's literary review, featured, among others, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Walter Lowenfels. Drawing on correspondence from many who were published in the Outsider, back issues of the Outsider, contemporary reviews, promotional materials, and interviews, Jeff Weddle shows how the press's mandarin insistence on production quality and its eclectic editorial taste made its work nonpareil among peers in the underground. Throughout, Bohemian New Orleans reveals the messy, complex, and vagabond spirit of a lost literary age.

Black Writers, White Publishers is a thoughtful examination of rough drafts and marketing pressures that reveal conflicts and compromises between five great authors and their publishers. In chapters on Larsen's Passing, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Gwendolyn Brooks's Children Coming Home, Morrison's "Oprah's Book Club" selections, and Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, John K. Young presents the first book-length application of editorial theory to African American literature. Focusing on the manuscripts, drafts, book covers, colophons, and advertisements that trace book production, Young expands upon the concept of socialized authorship and demonstrates how the study of publishing history and practice and African American literary criticism enrich each other.

From the moment Katherine Anne Porter arrived on the American literary scene in 1922, the public was intrigued with her life. Yet she herself revealed only scant facts of her background and often gave conflicting accounts. She maintained, though, that a germ of her own experience lay at the core of everything she wrote. Unrue finds that Porter's deceptions were a screen for deep personal turmoil. With unprecedented access to archival and personal papers, Unrue brings much new information to light. Porter's maternal grandmother was institutionalized; Porter had more marriages than she acknowledged; she lost babies to miscarriage, abortion, and stillbirth, and she grieved over her failed motherhood. Ever present were her fears of exile and insanity.

Each year, thousands of pilgrims visit the celebrated New Orleans tomb where Marie Laveau is said to lie. They seek her favors or fear her lingering influence. Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau is the first study of the Laveaus, mother and daughter of the same name. Both were legendary leaders of religious and spiritual traditions many still label as evil. The Laveaus were free women of color and prominent French-speaking Catholic Creoles. From the 1820s until the 1880s when one died and the other disappeared, gossip, fear, and fierce affection swirled about them. From the heart of the French Quarter, in dance, drumming, song, and spirit possession, they ruled the imagination of New Orleans.

Walter Anderson (1903-1965) was a prolific, fiercely individual artist renowned for his matchless style, his lonely independence, and his astonishingly creative works of art. Devoted to the beauty of the natural world, Anderson emblazoned the events of his everyday life into art that expressed a unique and absorbing vision. This compelling biography, published in celebration of his centennial, draws on Anderson's voluminous journals and graphic works, the previously unpublished papers of family members and friends, and archival materials from several American museums. In his creative diversity he was both an artist and a naturalist who left the art world paintings, prints, murals, journals, wood carvings, ceramic works, poems, aphorisms, and pen-and-ink illustrations of literary works. Despite poverty and mental anguish, Anderson called himself "Fortune's favorite child."

For a biographer Shelby Foote is a famously reluctant subject. In writing this biography, however, C. Stuart Chapman gained valuable access through interviews and shared correspondence, an advantage Foote rarely has granted to others. Born into Mississippi Delta gentry in 1916, Foote has engaged in a lifelong struggle with the realities behind his persona, the classic image of the southern gentleman. His polished civil graces mask a conflict deep within. Foote's beloved South is a changing region, and even progressive change, of which Foote approves, can be unsettling. In letters and interviews, and in his writings, he often waxes nostalgic as he grapples to recover the grace of an earlier time, particularly the era of the Civil War. Indeed, Chapman reveals that the whole of Foote's novels and historical narratives serves as a refuge from deeply ambiguous feelings.

Despite the Enlightenment's promise of utopian belonging among all citizens, blacks and Jews were excluded from the life of their host countries. In their diasporic exile both groups were marginalized as slaves, aliens, unbelievers, and frequently not fully human. The Identity Question: Blacks and Jews in Europe and America explores the effects of diaspora upon black and Jewish consciousness, demonstrating similar histories of marginality and oppression. Central to this examination are four key autobiographies, two from the late 1700s and two from recent history. The autobiographies of Richard Wright and Alfred Kazin, taken as prime twentieth-century American expressions of racial and ethnic identity, reveal striking similarities to their Enlightenment counterparts in Europe, the black Olaude Equiano and the Jewish Salomon Maimon.

Angela Davis, Assata Shakur (a.k.a. JoAnne Chesimard), and Elaine Brown are the only women activists of the Black Power movement who have published book-length autobiographies. In bearing witness to that era, these militant newsmakers wrote in part to educate and to mobilize their anticipated readers. Margo V. Perkins's critical analysis of their books is less a history of the movement (or of women's involvement in it) than an exploration of the politics of storytelling for activists who choose to write their lives. Perkins examines how activists use autobiography to connect their lives to those of other activists across historical periods, to emphasize the link between the personal and the political, and to construct an alternative history that challenges dominant or conventional ways of knowing.