The Symposium, to be held October 14-19, takes as its theme “Transforming Autobiography and History: Fiction as ‘The Continuous Thread of Revelation.'” The program features the following writers and scholars:
Rick Bragg grew up in Piedmont, Alabama, and attended Jacksonville State University, where he began his newspaper career at The Anniston Star. He has also worked on The Birmingham News, The Los Angeles Times, and The St. Petersburg Times. He attended Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow and has won numerous awards for his journalism, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1996. He currently serves as Atlanta Bureau Chief for The New York Times and is author of the memoir All Over but the Shoutin’.
Louisa Dixon was Mississippi’s Commissioner of Public Safety and the Mississippi Highway Patrol from 1988-1992 and has served as an assistant counsel at the US Department of Energy and as a law clerk for two federal judges. She lives with her husband and son in Jackson and raises trees in Natchez. She is the the author of two Laura Owens novels, Next to Last Chance and Outside Chance.
Mary Hood, who lives near Woodstock, Georgia, has held numerous Visiting Writer positions around the country, including the Grisham Chair in Southern Creative Writing at Ole Miss. Her short fiction has been honored with publication in anthologies such as: Pushcart Prize, Editors’ Choice, and New Stories from the South. She is the author of two collections, And Venus is Blue andHow Far She Went, as well as the novel, Familiar Heat.
Pearl McHaney teaches English at Georgia State University and has lectured on the work of Eudora Welty throughout the South and in France and Norway. She is editor of Eudora Welty: Writers’ Reflections upon First Reading Welty’s Work and A Writer’s Eye: Collection Book Reviews by Eudora Welty. Together with New York Times Book Review editor Nash K. Burger, she wrote The Road to West 43rd Street: A Memoir.
Lewis Nordan, who is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh, is the author of three collections of short fiction, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Club, The All-Girl Football Team, and Sugar Among the Freaks; four novels, Music of the Swamp, Wolf Whistle, The Sharpshooter Blues and Lightening Song; and a memoir, Boy With Loaded Gun, due out in January.
Margo V. Perkins received her doctorate from Cornell University and teaches English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She is this year’s Eudora Welty Prize Winner for her book Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties, forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi.
Cynthia Shearer grew up in Alapaha, Georgia, and lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where for six years she has been curator at Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s home. She is the author of The Wonder Book of the Air.
James Wilcox is Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Mississippi State and author of seven novels: Modern Baptists, Sort of Rich, Polite Sex, Plain and Normal, Miss Undine’s Living Room, Guest of a Sinner, and North Gladiola. He is a Yale graduate and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986.
