Jesmyn Ward was born in 1977 in DeLisle, Mississippi. Her mother’s employer paid for her to attend a private school after she was bullied by black students at a public school. She earned a BA at Stanford University in 1999 and a Master’s degree in 2000. Ward earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan in 2005.

Her first book Where the Line Bleeds was written to remember her younger brother, who was killed by a drunk driver. She was the winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2012 Alex Award for her second novel Salvage the Bones.

She currently teaches at Tulane University, but previously was an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama. She had a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University (2010 to 2011) and a John and Renee Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi for 2014.

She is the recipient of Tulane’s Paul and Debra Gibbons Professorship and also works closely with the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and the Newcomb College Institute.

In 2017, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius grant. She has now won the National Book Award twice. Ward’s novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, was awarded a National Book Award for fiction in November of 2017.

In January, 2020, Ward’s 33-year- old husband died of the coronvirus. Her article in Vanity Fair in September, 2020, expresses her heartbreak.

Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta, and raised in the nearby town of Grenada. 

By the age of thirteen, Donna Tartt had already begun to establish herself as an emerging literary talent. Tartt was especially fond of—and likewise adored by—her great-grandfather. It was he who helped facilitate Tartt’s interest in authors who would later influence Tartt’s own writing and storytelling. It was also he who, as she describes in her memoir “Sleepytown: A Southern Gothic Childhood, with Codeine” (1992), because of what she describes as his “nearly unlimited faith in the power of Pharmacy”. Because of this, Tartt spent nearly two years of her childhood “submerged in a pretty powerfully altered state of consciousness.” During the days that she was kept home from school due to a childhood illness, she would read and write poetry.

In 1976, at the age of thirteen, Tartt published one of her poems in a Mississippi literary journal. After high school, where she continued to pursue her interest in reading and writing, she enrolled in the University of Mississippi in 1981, where her writing caught the attention of Willie Morris while she was still a freshman. Following a recommendation from Morris, Barry Hannah, then an Ole Miss writer-in-residence, admitted the eighteen-year-old Tartt into his graduate course on the short story. “She was deeply literary,” said Hannah. “Just a rare genius, really. A literary star.” In 2014 Tartt won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her book, The Goldfinch.

Excerpt from Vanity Fair Interview of Donna Tartt September 1999:

‘We can’t hire you to be on the paper, but this is still really good.’…But without my knowing it, the guy at the paper had given a copy of one of my stories to Willie Morris. And I was in a bar at the Holiday Inn, and Willie came up to me and gave me his hand and said, ‘Are you Donna Tartt?’ And I said yes. And he said, ‘My name is Willie Morris, and I think you’re a genius. ”

Morris—former editor of Harper’s and New York literary darling, author of North Toward Home and several other autobiographical books—is part of the third wave of Mississippi writers, Faulkner and Eudora Welty representing the first and second. If the state has always been desperately poor economically, it has been loaded literarily. And Donna Tartt is a new wave all by herself.

From the Paris Review:

There’s a line in Barry Hannah’s most recent novel, Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001), that nicely describes his life and career thus far. “You need to see a bit of hell now and then,” he writes. “That and great joy.” In the years since he published his first novel, Geronimo Rex (1972, a National Book Award finalist), Hannah has experienced a lot of both. His reputation as a hard-boiled drinker from Mississippi who liked guns, rode motorcycles, and sometimes raised a little too much hell was of a piece with his early fiction—the stunning and painful prose, the raucous characters, the furious energy. These days, Hannah is considerably less hell-bound, and his work more sensitive, though none the less powerful for it. As he likes to say of the book he’s working on now, “There’s a lot of Christ in it.”

Hannah has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and critics herald his work for its postmodern complexities. Graphic violence often rides side by side with great humor, and, in keeping with the postmodern aesthetic, his work is more attuned to language and voice than strict plot. During the eighties and early nineties, he wrote prolifically, publishing a new work nearly every two years—Ray (1980); The Tennis Handsome (1983); Captain Maximus (1985); Hey Jack! (1987); Boomerang (1989); Never Die (1991); Bats Out of Hell (1993); and High Lonesome (1996).

Barry died of cancer in 2010 in Oxford, Mississippi.

Larry Brown, a well-known author of short stories and novels, was born in Oxford, Mississippi, on July 9, 1951.

After Larry Brown graduated from high school in 1969, he joined the Marine Corps where he served for two years.  There, he devoted many hours listening to countless war stories of disabled veterans just coming back from Vietnam.  Those stories helped the author establish the characters in his novel Dirty Work. After his tour of duty, he moved back to Mississippi and worked at several jobs before joining the Oxford Fire Department in 1973, where he worked as a firefighter for sixteen years.  In 1974 Larry married Mary Annie Coleman, who worked as a  secretary. It was during those years as a fireman that Brown first experimented with writing.  In those early writing days, he was self-taught and strongly influenced by authors that he admired.  He wrote story after story, submitting them to various publishing houses and receiving  rejection after rejection. Finally, his first story to be published was in “Easyrider” magazine, a magazine for bikers.  From his first book, the collection Facing the Music, published in 1988, Brown has been true to his story-telling depictions of lower- middle-class characters that use destructive means to escape everyday life.  His other major works include Dirty Work (1989), Big Bad Love (1990), Joe (1991), On Fire (1994), Father and Son (1996), Fay (2000), Billy Ray’s Farm:  Essays from a Place Called Tula  (2001) non-fiction,  The Rabbit Factory (2003) a novel, and A Miracle of Catfish, published posthumously in 2007.  His work Big Bad Love was made into a movie. 

Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who were married illegally at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother as “colored”, and the race of her father as “Canadian”. Natasha Trethewey  was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 2012 and again in 2013. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is a former Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

William R. Ferris was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Ferris got his B.A. in English Literature at Davidson College in 1964, and an M.A. in English Literature from Northwestern University in 1965. He attended Trinity College in Dublin, and returned to the U.S. to continue his graduate studies. In 1967, he received a Master’s and, in 1969, a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. He is former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He co-founded the Center for Southern Folklore; he was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, and is co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

Ferris’ work, Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris, represents the life’s work of William Ferris, an audio recordist, filmmaker, folklorist, and teacher with an unwavering commitment to establish and to expand the study of the American South.

Lewis Nordan was born in Forest, Mississippi. In 1983, at age forty-five, Nordan published his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair. The collection established him as a writer in the Southern tradition of William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery O’Connor. It also established a place for Nordan’s fiction, the fictional Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, a small town in the Mississippi Delta based loosely on Nordan’s hometown.

Clyde Edgerton wrote in the Paris Review, “The Southern Underbelly: Remembering Lewis Nordan”:

“The other night, in order to feel close to my friend Lewis “Buddy” Nordan, who recently died, I started rereading his novel Wolf Whistle, a story inspired by the murder of Emmett Till in 1954. (Buddy grew up in the Mississippi Delta near the place of the murder. He knew the murderers. He became friends with Emmett Till’s mother.)

In Buddy’s work I often find some balancing of Kafka, Jesus, and Monty Python. And reading him I sometimes wish everybody came from where he came from so they might better know firsthand the marvels of his characters’ language. In that place he grew up, the Delta, you might find (compared to Faulkner’s hometown) some few degrees of movement toward a kind of apparent modern Southern underbelly. “

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, but his family soon moved to Oxford, Mississippi. Almost all of his novels take place in and around Oxford, which he renames Jefferson, Mississippi. Even though Faulkner is a contemporary American author, he is already considered to be one of the world’s greatest novelists. In 1949, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the highest prize.

In all of his work, Faulkner has used new techniques to express his views of man’s position in the modern world. In his earlier works, Faulkner viewed man’s position in the universe with despair. He saw man as a weak creature incapable of rising above his selfish needs. Later, Faulkner’s view changed. In his more recent works, he sees man as potentially great, or, in Faulkner’s own words, “Man will not merely endure: he will prevail.” In almost all of his novels, Faulkner penetrates deeply into the psychological motivations for man’s actions and investigates man’s dilemma in the modern world.

Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911, Tennessee was the son of a shoe company executive and a Southern belle. Williams described his childhood in Mississippi as happy and carefree. This sense of belonging and comfort were lost, however, when his family moved to the urban environment of St. Louis, Missouri. It was there he began to look inward, and to write— “because I found life unsatisfactory.” Williams’ early adult years were occupied with attending college at three different universities, a brief stint working at his father’s shoe company, and a move to New Orleans, which began a lifelong love of the city and set the locale for A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE.

Williams spent a number of years traveling throughout the country and trying to write. His first critical acclaim came in 1944 when THE GLASS MENAGERIE opened in Chicago and went to Broadway. It won a the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and, as a film, the New York Film Critics’ Circle Award. At the height of his career in the late 1940s and 1950s, Williams worked with the premier artists of the time, most notably Elia Kazan, the director for stage and screen productions of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, and the stage productions of CAMINO REAL, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, and SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH. Kazan also directed Williams’ film BABY DOLL. Like many of his works, BABY DOLL was simultaneously praised and denounced for addressing raw subject matter in a straightforward realistic way.

The 1960s were perhaps the most difficult years for Williams, as he experienced some of his harshest treatment from the press. In 1961 he wrote THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, and in 1963, THE MILK TRAIN DOESN’T STOP HERE ANY MORE. His plays, which had long received criticism for openly addressing taboo topics, were finding more and more detractors. Around this time, Williams’ longtime companion, Frank Merlo, died of cancer. Williams began to depend more and more on alcohol and drugs and though he continued to write, completing a book of short stories and another play, he was in a downward spiral. In 1969 he was hospitalized by his brother.

After his release from the hospital in the 1970s, Williams wrote plays, a memoir, poems, short stories and a novel. In 1975 he published MEMOIRS, which detailed his life and discussed his addiction to drugs and alcohol, as well as his homosexuality. In 1980 Williams wrote CLOTHES FOR A SUMMER HOTEL, based on the lives of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Only three years later, Tennessee Williams died in a New York City hotel filled with half-finished bottles of wine and pills. It was in this desperation, which Williams had so closely known and so honestly written about, that we can find a great man and an important body of work. His genius was in his honesty and in the perseverance to tell his stories.

Eudora Welty was born in 1909, in Jackson, Mississippi and grew up in a prosperous home with her two younger brothers.  Welty was educated at the Mississippi State College for Women (Now called Mississippi University for Women), the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University.

During the 1930s, Welty worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration. This job sent her all over the state of Mississippi taking Photographs of people from all economic and social classes. Collections of her photographs are One Time, One Place, and Photographs.

But Welty’s true love was language, not photography. She soon devoted her energy to writing fiction. Her first short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” appeared in 1936. In 1941 she published her first collection of short stories, A Curtain Of Green.

Welty traveled an enormous amount. It exhausts me just to think about it. She took many trips to Europe, especially Italy, France, England, and Ireland, and parts of every year were spent in New York and on lecture and reading tours and, of course, in accepting her many many prizes: the Pulitzer Prize, for The Optimist?s Daughter, the Howells Medal, and eight O. Henry short story awards.She received Freedom Medal of Honor twice from President Jimmy Carter and President Ronald Reagan.

She also collected thirty-nine honorary doctorates, from such schools as Columbia, Brandeis, Yale, Harvard, the University of Burgundy in France, sometimes as many as five in one year.

Eudora Welty died unmarried on July 23, 2001 at the age of 92.

Shelby Foote, (born November 17, 1916, Greenville, Mississippi, U.S.—died June 27, 2005, Memphis, Tennessee), American historian, novelist, and short-story writer known for his works treating the United States Civil War and the American South.

Foote attended the University of North Carolina for two years, and he served in the U.S. Army during World War II. His first novel, Tournament, was published in 1949. Like many of Foote’s later novels, it is set in Bristol, Mississippi, a fictional town modeled on Foote’s hometown. Follow Me Down (1950), considered by many critics to be his best novel, is based on an actual murder trial. It shows—through shifting monologues—a seduction and murder and, ultimately, the failure of love. The theme recurs in Love in a Dry Season (1951), which is set against the changing fortunes of the South from the 1920s to World War II.

Shiloh (1952), Foote’s first popular success, uses the monologues of six soldiers to recreate the Civil War battle of its title. Foote next set out to write what proved to be his masterwork, The Civil War: A Narrative (1958–74), which consists of three volumes—Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958), Fredericksburg to Meridian (1963), and Red River to Appomattox (1974). Considered a masterpiece by many critics, it was also criticized by academics for its lack of footnotes and other scholarly conventions. Despite its superb storytelling, the work received little popular attention until Foote appeared as a narrator and commentator in Ken Burns’s 11-hour television documentary The Civil War (1990). Foote also wrote the novel September, September (1977; filmed for television as Memphis, 1991), about the South in crisis, and he edited Chickamauga and Other Civil War Stories (1993).

Margaret Walker received her A.B. from Northwestern University (1935) and an M.A. (1940) and Ph.D. (1965) from the University of Iowa. For more than 30 years Walker taught literature at Livingstone College, Salisbury, North Carolina (1941-1942); West Virginia State College (1944-1945); and Jackson State University, Jackson, Mississippi (1949-1979). Her Civil War novel Jubilee (1966), begun when she was 19, dramatizes actual historical events from American slavery to Reconstruction as the setting for the fictionalized life of her maternal great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans. This novel was translated into five languages and went through 43 printings. Her other book-length works include Prophets for a New Day (1970), How I Wrote Jubilee (1972), October Journey (1973), and A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Margaret Walker and Nikki Giovanni (1974). Walker also wrote numerous articles on African American literature and culture.

After retiring from teaching at Jackson State University, Walker devoted full-time effort to her writing.Walker has continued to reside in Jackson, Mississippi, where she said she must stay and “write for the rest of [her] life, no matter how short or long it is.”

Wright was born on September 4, 1908, on a Mississippi plantation 22 miles east of Natchez. All of his four grandparents were slaves. He would find it ironic that today there is a plaque in Natchez marking his birth, for his upbringing in the South was a bitter, fearful experience, not something he looked back on with any fondness. His father deserted his family when Richard was five years old. He was shuttled to different family homes in Mississippi (Jackson and Greenwood) and Arkansas (Elaine and West Helena) before moving to Memphis. There was rarely enough food in the house. At six he became a drunkard, egged on by men who frequented a saloon. His grandmother was a Seventh-day Adventist who didn’t let Richard read books that strayed from this gospel. He was beaten severely for various infractions. He started school late because he didn’t have presentable clothes to wear.

He never graduated from high school. And from a very early age he was abused mentally and physically by racist employers. In his memoir, Black Boy, Wright described those early years as “dark and lonely as death.” Those dark views framed his early books, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), a collection of short stories depicting lynchings of blacks in the South, Native Son (1940), his breakthrough novel featuring the brutish Bigger Thomas, who kills a white woman out of fear of being caught in her room and then stuffs her body into a furnace, and Black Boy (1945), which stands as one of the great memoirs of American literature.

Wright’s short life (he died in 1960, in Paris) represented a triumph of dogged determination over the virulent racial prejudice he depicted in his books.

Beth Henley, in full Elizabeth Becker Henley, is an American playwright of regional dramas set in provincial Southern towns, the best known of which, Crimes of the Heart (1982; filmed 1986), was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1981..

Henley, a graduate of Southern Methodist University, University Park, Texas (B.F.A., 1974), turned from acting to writing as a career because she felt that the theatre offered few good contemporary roles for Southern women. Her first play, the one-act Am I Blue, was produced while she was still an undergraduate. Crimes of the Heart, her first full-length play, was produced in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1979 and in New York City in 1980.

Henley’s later plays include the two-act The Miss Firecracker Contest (1979; filmed as Miss Firecracker, 1989), in which a small-town young woman of dubious reputation attempts to gain respect by winning a beauty contest; The Wake of Jamey Foster (1983), which centres on a family grieving over the death of the alcoholic title character; The Lucky Spot (1986); Abundance (1991), a revisionist western about mail-order brides in the Wyoming Territory; Control Freaks (1992); and The Jacksonian (2013), which is set in a Jackson, Mississippi, motel in 1964 and revolves around a murder. Henley has also written television scripts and screenplays.

Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi. When Ford was eight years old, his father had a severe heart failure, and thereafter Ford spent as much time with his grandfather, a former prizefighter and hotel owner in Little Rock, Arkansas, as he did with his parents in Mississippi. Ford’s father died of a second heart attack in 1960. In Jackson, Ford lived across the street from the home of author Eudora Welty. His novel Independence Day, won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His novel Wildlife was adapted into a 2018 film of the same name.