Exhibits
The conference was sponsored by the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Southern Documentary Project, Southern Foodways Alliance, Friends of the Library, Mississippi Humanities Council, Square Books, Visit Oxford, and other generous sponsors.
The exhibit, compiled by Alex Watson, highlights many of the books and authors featured during the Conference; all are currently available for purchase from Square Books, among other booksellers.
Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance / Edited by Sandra Beasley
With Vinegar and Char the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrates twenty years of symposia by offering a collection of poems that are by turns as sophisticated and complex, as vivid and funny, and as buoyant and poignant as any SFA gathering. These poets represent past, current, and future conversations about what it means to be southern. These pages are a perfect way to spend the hour before supper, with a glass of iced tea.
City of a Million Dreams / Jason Berry
"Berry orchestrates a parade of vibrant personalities, delivers a character-driven history of New Orleans at its tricentennial. Chronicling cycles of invention, struggle, death, and rebirth, Berry reveals the city's survival as a triumph of diversity, its map-of-the-world neighborhoods marked by resilience despite hurricanes, epidemics, fires, and floods."
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom / David W. Blight
David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers for a definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and a leading abolitionist and writers of the era.
Gone Home / Karida L. Brown
Americans have witnessed countless stories about Appalachia that largely ignore black Appalachian lives. Karida L. Brown offers a much-needed corrective to the current whitewashing of Appalachia. n telling the stories of African Americans living and working in Appalachian coal towns, Brown offers a sweeping look at race, identity, changes in politics and policy, and black migration in the region and beyond.
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia / Elizabeth Catte
In 2016, journalists flocked to Appalachia to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. This book analyzes trends in contemporary writing on Appalachia, presents a brief history of Appalachia with an eye toward unpacking Appalachian stereotypes, and provides examples of writing, art, and policy created by Appalachians as opposed to for Appalachians.
Salvation on Sand Mountain / Dennis Covington
What began as a journalistic assignment-covering the trial of an Alabama pastor convicted of attempting to murder his wife with poisonous snakes would evolve into a haunting exploration of faith. From a preacher convicted of attempted murder to a first-hand account of holiness serpent handling, a headlong plunge into a bizarre, mysterious, and ultimately irresistible world of unshakable faith.
Thinking In Bets / Annie Duke
Even the best decision doesn't yield the best outcome every time. There's always an element of luck that you can't control, and there is always information that is hidden from view. So the key to long-term success is to think in bets: How sure am I? What are the possible ways things could turn out? What decision has the highest odds of success? Did I land in the unlucky 10% on the strategy that works 90% of the time?
Border Walk / Mark J. Hainds
"You won't make it!"
"They will kidnap and kill you!"
Undeterred, he left his family and his job for a 1,000-plus mile trek along the Texas-Mexico Border. And on the banks of the Rio Grande, he began to realize just how wrong we are, about virtually every aspect of life and death along La Frontera. This trek was featured in the film La Frontera.
Heavy / Kiese Laymon
Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.
UnWhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film / Meredith McCarroll
Analyzing the representation of the people of Appalachia in films such as Deliverance, Cold Mountain, Medium Cool, Norma Rae, Cape Fear, The Killing Season, and Winter's Bone through the critical lens of race and specifically whiteness. McCarroll asserts that white privilege remains intact while Appalachia is othered through reliance on recognizable nonwhite cinematic stereotypes.
Torn From Their Bindings / Travis McDade
Travis McDade's account of Robert Kindred's brazen theft of irreplaceable antique illustrations and maps from academic libraries across the country unfolds with the drama of a true crime page-turner. Along the way we observe the nature and methods of the book thief, defacer of priceless volumes and purveyor of purloined pages, and acquire a wealth of knowledge about the antique prints he favored.
Animals Eat Each Other / Elle Nash
A girl with no name embarks on a fraught three-way relationship with a Satanist/tattoo artist, and his girlfriend, a new mom. The liaison is caged by strict rules and rigid emotional distance. Nonetheless, it's all too easy to surrender to an attraction so powerful she finds herself erased. With stripped-down prose and unflinching clarity, Nash examines madness in the wreckage of love, and the loss of self that accompanies it.
After the Fall / Dan Santat
Caldecott Medalist Dan Santat's poignant tale follows Humpty Dumpty, an avid bird watcher whose favorite place to be is high up on the city wall—that is, until after his famous fall. Now terrified of heights, Humpty can longer do many of the things he loves most. A masterful picture book that will remind readers of all ages that Life begins when you get back up.
Don't Skip Out on Me / Willy Vlautin
Horace Hopper is a half-Paiute, half-Irish ranch hand who wants to be somebody. He's spent most of his life on the ranch of his kindly guardians, Mr. and Mrs. Reese, herding sheep alone in the mountains. But while the Reeses treat him like a son, Horace can't shake the shame he feels from being abandoned by his parents. He decides to leave the only loving home he's known to prove his worth by training to become a boxer.
The Unpunished Vice / Edmund White
Blending memoir and literary criticism, The Unpunished Vice is a compendium of all the ways reading has shaped White's life and work. His larger-than-life presence on the literary scene lends itself to fascinating, intimate insights into the lives of some of the world's best-loved cultural figures. A wickedly smart and insightful account of a life in literature.
To Live Here, You Have to Fight / Jessica Wilkerson
Inspiring yet sobering, it reveals Appalachian women as the indomitable caregivers of a region, and overlooked actors in the movements that defined their time. Their insistence that caregiving was valuable labor clashed with entrenched attitudes and rising criticisms of welfare. Their persistence brought them into unlikely coalitions to fight for causes that ranged from poor people's rights to community health to unionization.
A Fanstastic State of Ruin: The Painted Towns of Rajasthan / David Zurick
For centuries, the painted buildings of Shekhawati in rural Rajasthan, India served the towns as trading houses, pleasure palaces, temples, caravansaries, and private homes. The buildings have slowly deteriorated over time, ravaged by climate and neglect, and now lie scattered among the desert settlements as an elegiac collection of beautiful living ruins.