author of The Everlasting
Saturday, October 24, 10:40 a.m.
Katy Simpson Smith returns to the symposium with her third novel, The Everlasting, in which she weaves together four stories from four centuries, contemplating love, the body, and mortality, all connected by ancient Rome, a fish hook, a saint, and the ultimate unreliable narrator, Satan. Kirkus Reviews calls it “a sparkling historical novel” that “bounds through 2,000 years of history, following four indelible characters as they grapple with questions of faith, freedom, and transgressive love.” A native of Jackson, Mississippi, Smith has served as Eudora Welty Chair for Southern Literature at Millsaps College and now lives and writes in New Orleans. Her previous novels are The Story of Land and Sea and Free Men. She is also the author of the scholarly title We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835.