Jo Watson Hackl is a writer, a corporate attorney, and an outdoor enthusiast. She won the Southern Book Prize for children’s and young adult literature for her 2018 novel Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe, inspired by her childhood hometown of Electric Mills, Mississippi. She lives with her family in Greenville, South Carolina.

Sarah Frances Hardy is a children’s author, illustrator and professional painter. A former lawyer, Hardy studied art at the Parsons School of Design and has had her paintings featured in galleries and commercial establishments. Her newest book One Mississippi is based on the newly adopted official state song of Mississippi with lyrics by award winning singer/songwriter Steve Azar. A native of Jackson, Hardy lives with her husband John, a native of Columbus, and three daughters in Oxford, Mississippi.

Linda Williams Jackson is the author of Midnight Without a Moon, which was an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book, a Jane Addams Honor Book for Peace and Social Justice, and a Washington Post Summer Book Club Selection. Her second book, A Sky Full of Stars, received a Malka Penn Honor for an outstanding children’s book addressing human rights issues. Her two most recent books are The Lucky Ones and Saving Jimmy. Born and raised in Rosedale, Mississippi, she lives in Southaven, Mississippi, with her family.

Beth Kander is an award-winning playwright and author currently based in Chicago. Beth has an MSW from the University of Michigan, an MFA in Creative Writing from Mississippi University for Women, and a BA from Brandeis University. She is the author of several children’s and YA books, including Do Not Eat This Book! Fun with Jewish Foods and Festivals, and her adult debut novel I Made It out of Clay will be released in December from MIRA.

Maya Corrigan is the author of the Five-Ingredient Mystery Series. Corrigan lives near Washington, D.C., close to the setting for her series, Maryland's Eastern Shore. A winner of the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery and Suspense, she has published essays on drama and short stories as well as taught courses in writing, detective fiction, and American literature at Georgetown University and NOVA Community College.

Miranda James is the pseudonym of Dean James, the New York Times bestselling author of the Cat in the Stacks Mysteries and the Southern Ladies Mysteries. He has published more than thirty novels, writing under his own name and the pseudonyms Jimmie Ruth Evans and Honor Hartman. A seventh-generation Mississippian, Dean lives with four cats and thousands of books.

Dale Gray is the author of South of Somewhere. Born in South Africa, she moved to South Korea to teach English and spent six years there. In her last year in South Korea, she met a soldier from Mississippi, and they fell in love. When they moved back to the United States, Dale began to experiment with Korean and South African flavors, along with the Southern dishes she was introduced to. She shares her recipes on TheDaleyPlate.com and now has hundreds of thousands of followers. She lives in Mississippi with her husband.

Tracee Watkins was named the director of the Culinary Arts Institute at Mississippi University for Women in 2023. A graduate of MUW’s Culinary Arts program, she also holds an MBA from Mississippi State University and a PhD from Kansas State University. She was named a James Beard Foundation National Scholar in 2017.

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Tyriek White is a writer, musician, and educator from Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of We Are a Haunting, winner of The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. The novel was also a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and long-listed for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize. In 2024, he was named a National Book Foundation '5 Under 35' honoree. He has received fellowships from Callaloo, New York State Writers Institute, and Key West Literary Seminar, among other honors. He is currently the media director of Lampblack Literary Foundation, which seeks to provide mutual aid and various resources to Black writers across the diaspora. He holds a degree in Creative Writing & Africana Studies from Pitzer College and has earned an MFA from the University of Mississippi.

Exodus Oktavia Brownlow is a Blackhawk, Mississippi native. She is a graduate of Mississippi Valley State University with a BA in English and Mississippi University for Women with an MFA in Creative Writing. She has been nominated for Best of The Net, Best MicroFiction, Best Small Fictions and a Pushcart Prize. Her debut collection of essays I'm Afraid That I Know Too Much About Myself Now, To Go Back To Who I Knew Before, And Oh Lord, Who Will I Be After I've Known All That I Can was published in 2023.

Saddiq Dzukogi is a Nigerian poet and assistant professor of English at Mississippi State University. He is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla, winner of the 2022 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the 2022 Julie Suk Award. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships from the Nebraska Art Council, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Pen America, and Ebedi International Residency. Saddiq lives and writes from Starkville, Mississippi.

Phillip “Pip” Gordon is a visiting assistant professor for the Sarah Isom Center at the University of Mississippi. He received his BA in English from the University of Tennessee-Martin and holds both an MA and PhD in English from the University of Mississippi. His publications include Gay Faulkner and the introduction to the 2023 reissue of The Welcome by Hubert Creekmore. From 2014 to 2023, he was associate professor of English and LGBTQ+ Studies coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.

Lauren Rhoades, founder and editor-in-chief of Rooted Magazine, is a Mississippi transplant originally from Denver, Colorado. Since moving to Jackson in 2013, she has served with AmeriCorps, started Mississippi’s first fermentation company, and helmed the Eudora Welty House & Garden. She is now director of grants at the Mississippi Arts Commission and a host of MPB’s The Mississippi Arts Hour. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Mississippi University for Women. Her debut memoir, Split the Baby, is forthcoming March 2025 with Belle Point Press.

C. T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut collection Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking was a finalist for the Theodore Roethke Memorial Prize. He’s the author of three chapbooks and the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Poetry. He is a graduate of Mississippi University for Women’s BA and MFA programs in creative writing and serves as the University Archivist at Delta State University.

John G. Anderson, the youngest child of Sissy and Walter Anderson, grew up in the artistic retreat at Shearwater Pottery. After college, he served as an officer in the US Navy and worked as a teacher, a national park ranger, and a marine biologist/ecologist before returning to graduate school to study neuroscience and become a psychologist. In the past several years, he has been the curator or co-curator for twelve exhibits of his father's art. He is the author of The Bicycle Logs of Walter Anderson.

Kendall Dunkelberg is the department chair of Language, Literature and Philosophy and the director of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, Mississippi, where he also directs the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium. He is the author of three poetry collections, including Barrier Island Suite, inspired by the life, art, and writings of Walter Inglis Anderson.

Berkley Hudson, the author of O. N. Pruitt's Possum Town, is emeritus associate professor of journalism studies at the Missouri School of Journalism. Hudson grew up in Columbus, Mississippi and was photographed by O.N. Pruitt as a child. In the early 1970s, Hudson and four of his boyhood friends discovered a collection of Pruitt’s work in their hometown. They purchased the collection of 142,000 negatives, including those from Pruitt’s assistant Calvin Shanks, in 1987 and spent the next 30 years archiving, researching and preserving the work.

Anthony Thaxton is the co-author of Walter Anderson: The Extraordinary Life and Art of the Islander and the director of the accompanying documentary film. He was named the 2019 Distinguished Art Alumnus of the Year for Mississippi College. He writes, directs, films, and edits the Palate to Palette television series through his production company, Thaxton Studios. He enjoys playing music with his son, painting with his daughter, and traveling with his beautiful wife.

Sarah Adlakha is a native of Chicago who now lives along the Mississippi Gulf Coast with her husband, three daughters, two horses, and one dog. She started writing fiction shortly after retiring from her psychiatry practice. Her debut novel, She Wouldn’t Change a Thing, was a CNN most anticipated book of 2021. Midnight on the Marne, her second novel, won the 2023 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction Award.

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

Jennifer Moffett is an author, editor, community college instructor, and all-around beachgoer. She grew up in Arkansas until a college study abroad program in Italy sparked a lifelong passion for travel. After working in children's television in New York, she received a master's in creative writing from the University of Mississippi. She lives on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Ace Atkins is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author who started his writing career as a crime beat reporter in Florida. Don’t Let the Devil Ride is his thirtieth novel. His previous novels include eleven books in the Quinn Colson series and multiple true-crime novels based on infamous crooks and killers. In 2010, he was chosen by Robert B. Parker’s family to continue the iconic Spenser series, adding ten novels to the franchise. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi with his family.

Michael Farris Smith is an award-winning writer whose novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, NPR, Southern Living, Garden & Gun, Oprah Magazine, Book Riot, and numerous other outlets, and have been named Indie Next, Barnes & Noble Discover, and Amazon Best of the Month selections. He has also written the feature-film adaptations of his novels Desperation Road and The Fighter, titled for the screen as Rumble Through the Dark. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and daughters.

W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of A Place Like Mississippi, Ever Is a Long Time, and The House at the End of the Road. He is a recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a fellow at the New America Foundation. In February 2023 he was awarded the Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award for excellence in literature and as a cultural ambassador for Mississippi. Eubanks lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and three children, and is currently visiting professor of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.