Annual Welty Writers’ Symposium to feature W. Ralph Eubanks
COLUMBUS – The Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium returns to Rent Auditorium on the campus of Mississippi University for Women Oct. 21-23, featuring author, scholar, editor and essayist W. Ralph Eubanks, whose most recent book “A Place Like Mississippi” weaves travelogue, literary history and memoir into an evocative portrayal of our state and its literary landscape.
Eubanks is the past director of publishing for the Library of Congress and former editor of Virginia Quarterly Review. His many publishing credits include articles and essays in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and WIRED!, among many others, and his previous book publications include “Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past” and “The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South.”
This year’s symposium theme “‘All They Saw Was at the Point of Coming Together’: A Confluence of Southern Writers” celebrates our return to an in-person symposium after last year’s first-ever allvirtual event. All symposium panels will be held on campus and are free and open to the public in Whitfield Hall’s Rent Auditorium to allow for social distancing. The event will also live-stream to the symposium’s Facebook page for those who are not comfortable attending in person or in case of renewed COVID-19 restrictions.
Please visit www. muw.edu/welty to RSVP to attend in person, join the live stream or view other updates about the symposium, which is made possible through the generous support of the Robert M. Hearin Foundation.
This year’s symposium features four returning writers Josh Russell and Becky Hagenston with new story collections, “King of the Animals” and “The Age of Discovery” respectively, as well as poets Ashley M. Jones and Kendra Allen with their collections “Reparations Now!” and “The Collection Plate.” Jones was named poet laureate of Alabama in 2021 and is the first African American woman to hold the position. Hagenston is a resident of Starkville and professor of English at Mississippi State University.
Authors who are new to the symposium include Annette Saunook Clapsaddle with her debut novel “Even As We Breathe” set in a Cherokee community in North Carolina; longtime Oxford resident Lee Durkee with his second novel “The Last Taxi
Driver”; and Angela Jackson-brown who brings her third book “When Stars Rain Down,” a historical novel that confronts a racial violence in north Georgia. Poets include former Louisiana poet laureate Jack Bedell with his collection “Color All Maps New,” as well as Joshua Nguyen, whose debut collection “Come Clean” won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, and Thomas B. Richardson, who is an MSMS faculty member and W MFA alumnus with his debut collection “How to
Read,” published by Friendly City Books.
The Eudora Welty Prize will be awarded to Dr. Casey Kayser for her study, “Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender.” Along with the published authors, The W will welcome five high school students, winners of the Eudora Welty Ephemera Prize for fiction, essay or poetry, which this year was judged by Kendra Allen and Annette Clapsaddle.