Exhibits
The 31st Oxford Conference for the Book is sponsored byCenter for the Study of Southern Culture, Square Books, the College of Liberal Arts, the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics, the Departments of Writing and Rhetoric, English, Journalism, and Music, the University of Mississippi Foundation, Thacker Mountain Radio Hour, the Willie Morris Awards for Southern Writing, the Mississippi Humanities Council, the National Book Foundation, the Friends of the Library, the University Museum, Southside Gallery, Visit Oxford, First Regional Library, and the R&B Feder Foundation.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His newest release, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension is a New York Times bestseller and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His previous book, A Little Devil in America, was a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2021, Abdurraqib was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2024 he was named a Windham-Campbell Prize recipient. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Alice Austen won the John Cassavetes Award for her debut film Give Me Liberty (writer/producer). She is a past resident of the Royal Court Theatre and her internationally produced plays include Animal Farm (Steppenwolf Theatre), Water, Cherry Orchard Massacre, and Girls in the Boat. She studied creative writing under Seamus Heaney at Harvard, where she received her JD, after which she moved to Brussels and lived on Place Brugmann. Her latest book is the novel 33 Place Brugmann. Austen currently lives in Milwaukee and is working on a new film.
Melissa Ginsburg is the author of the novels The House Uptown and Sunset City, the poetry collections Runoff (forthcoming in 2026 from Milkweed Editions), Doll Apollo, and Dear Weather Ghost, and three poetry chapbooks, Arbor, Double Blind, and Apollo. She is winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters poetry award and has been named the South Arts 2024 Mississippi State Fellow for Literary Arts. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Image, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Fence, Southwest Review, and other magazines. She is director of graduate creative writing programs at the University of Mississippi.
Maggie Graber is the author of Swan Hammer, winner of the 2021 Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize and a 2023 nominee for a Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award. She has received fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission and the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, and she lives and teaches in Oxford, Mississippi, where she earned her PhD.
Julia Kolchinsky (formerly Dasbach) emigrated from Dnipro, Ukraine, as when she was six years old. She is the author the poetry collections The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, and 40 WEEKS. Her fourth poetry collection, Parallax, was just published in March by the Arkansas University Press. Her writing has appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. She is assistant professor of English and creative writing at Denison University.
Preston Lauterbach is author of the American music classic The Chitlin’ Circuit, as well as Beale Street Dynasty and Bluff City. His latest, Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King, was published in January of 2025. Lauterbach has coauthored three memoirs with significant figures in Black music, including Brother Robert with the stepsister of bluesman Robert Johnson; Timekeeper, with Memphis soul drummer Howard Grimes; and the Blind Boys of Alabama biography Spirit of the Century. His works have earned book of the year recognition from the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Rolling Stone.
Rachel Lyon is the author of Self-Portrait with Boy, a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s 2018 First Novel Prize, and Fruit of the Dead, an Oprah Magazine best book of 2024 and which The New York Times called “superb” and “refreshing.” Lyon’s short stories have appeared in One Story, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, and other publications. She has taught creative writing most recently at Bennington College and at the American University of Paris, where she was the 2024 Paris Writer in Residence. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, she lives with her family in Western Massachusetts.
Bernice L. McFadden is an assistant professor of creative writing at Tulane University and the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Sugar, The Warmest December, Loving Donovan, Nowhere Is a Place, Glorious, Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012), The Book of Harlan (winner of a 2017 American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction), and Praise Song for the Butterflies (longlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction). She is a five-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of three awards from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
Michael McFee is the author or editor of seventeen books, most recently A Long Time to Be Gone: Poems and Appointed Rounds: Essays. A native of Asheville, North Carolina, he taught in the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1990 to 2024.
Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Colorfast, Forage, Its Day Being Gone, and The Always Broken Plates of Mountains. She is coeditor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia and the journal Southern Humanities Review. She has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, has served as Dartmouth poet-in-residence at the Frost Place, and is winner of the National Poetry Series, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry, among other prizes. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and the Oxford American. She is currently the Lanier Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University.
Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including his latest, Fugitive/Refuge. His other works include Shrapnel Maps, The Sound of Listening, Pictures at an Exhibition, the translation I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky, and Sand Opera. His work has garnered fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as six Ohio Arts Council grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Lyric Poetry Award, the Alice James Award, the Creative Workforce Fellowship, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University.
James Ponti is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of four middle-grade book series, including City Spies and The Sherlock Society. His novels have been named to forty-five state award lists, optioned by Hollywood, and translated into fifteen languages. He’s a two-time Edgar Award–nominee, winning in 2018 for Vanished. He lives with his family in Orlando, Florida.
Jamie Quatro is The New York Times notable author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for The Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, Literary Hub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement. Quatro’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Ploughshares. Her latest book Two-Step Devil, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, is this year’s winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing in the fiction category. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo and teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. She lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Lilliam Rivera is a MacDowell Fellow and author of eight works of fiction: four young-adult novels, three middle-grade books, and a graphic novel for DC Comics. Her books have been awarded a Pura Belpré honor and featured on NPR and in The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and multiple “best of” lists. Her novel Never Look Back is slated for a movie adaptation. A Bronx, New York, native, Lilliam Rivera currently lives in Los Angeles.
Leona Sevick’s work appears in Orion, The Southern Review, The Sun, and Poetry Northwest. Sevick serves on the advisory boards of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is provost and professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature. Her second collection of poems, The Bamboo Wife, was published by Trio House Press in 2024.
Sheila Sundar is the author of the novel Habitations. Her writing has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Threepenny Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012–2014), while also serving as the Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi (2012–2016). She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir; a book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and five collections of poetry: Monument: Poems New & Selected, which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall; Native Guard, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia; and Domestic Work, which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. She is also the editor of The Essential Muriel Rukeyser, Best New Poets 2007: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers, and Best American Poetry 2017. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. From 2015 to 2016 she served as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities, and in 2020, she received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from the Library of Congress. A member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets in 2019. At Northwestern University she is Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
Boyce Upholt is a writer and nature critic whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic, the Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He is the winner of a James Beard Award for investigative journalism, and he lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Upholt is this year’s winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing in the nonfiction category for The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi. The Great River is his first book.
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and Beast Meridian, which was a 2019 Whiting Award winner, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, and the winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. She was a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and holds a doctorate in English literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she lives with her son.
Elijah Wald is a musician and author of more than a dozen books, including Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of Popular Music, and the bestselling Dylan Goes Electric! He has a PhD in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics and a Grammy for production and liner notes. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Zach Williams is a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University, where he previously held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. His story “Trial Run,” published in The Paris Review, was one of three winners of 2023 ASME Awards for Fiction. Originally from Wilmington, Delaware, he currently resides with his family in San Francisco.