Write On, Mississippi!

Sit back, relax, bring your appetite, and listen in on a conversation between our host, Ebony Lumumba, and James Beard award-winning food writer and historian, Michael W. Twitty. In Twitty’s newest, Koshersoul, he takes us on a personal journey through African and Jewish culinary traditions.

Join book festival board member Chris Goodwin as he chats with Rinker Buck about his latest nonfiction triumph, Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure. Buck gives Goodwin the nuts and bolts of building and maneuvering a historic flatboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans.  

Join our guest host, Sarah Story, as she talks with Juhea Kim about her debut novel, Beasts of a Little Land, an epic story of love, war, and redemption set against the backdrop of the Korean independence movement, following the intertwined fates of a young girl sold to a courtesan school and the penniless son of a hunter.

Join Texas-native poet Joshua Nguyen and guest host Sarah Story as they discuss Nguyen’s award-winning poetry collection, Come Clean. Poems in the collection aim to confront the speaker’s past by physically and mentally, cleaning up. Come Clean unpacks, organizes, and tidies up life’s messy joys and hurtful chaos with intimacy, grace, and vulnerability.

CALLING ALL TRUE CRIME LOVERS! Mississippi Delta native and author Beverly Lowry discusses her newest nonfiction work centered on a murder that rocked her Delta community when she was a child. Through rigorous research, one-on-one interviews, and her childhood recollections, Lowry sheds light on a decades-old murder case shrouded in mystery and injustice since that fateful, bloody day. 

Join our host Ebony Lumumba as she talks with author and professor, Imani Perry about her latest book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Perry is the author of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, winner of the 2019 Bograd-Weld Biography Prize from the Pen America Foundation. She is also the author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation; and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. Perry, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago, lives outside Philadelphia with her two sons.

Sit back, relax, and listen as Antoine Wilson discusses Mouth to Mouth, his fresh new novel with Ellen Daniels of the Mississippi Book Festival.Antoine Wilson is the author of the novels Panorama City and The Interloper. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, Best New American Voices, and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications, and he is a contributing editor of A Public Space. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin, he lives in Los Angeles. His website is: AntoineWilson.com

Gripping suspense, extraordinary heroism, and enduring love--set against the high stakes of wartime--resonate in these magnificently timeless stories of survival against all odds.Panelists:Ariel Lawhon is a critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction. She is the author of THE WIFE THE MAID AND THE MISTRESS, FLIGHT OF DREAMS, I WAS ANASTASIA, and the CODE NAME HÉLÈNE. Her books have been translated into numerous languages and have been Library Reads, One Book One County, Indie Next, Costco, Amazon Spotlight, and Book of the Month Club selections. She lives in the rolling hills outside Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband and four sons. Ariel splits her time between the grocery store and the baseball field.Kristin Harmel is the New York Times bestselling, USA Today bestselling, and #1 international bestselling author of more than a dozen novels, including THE FOREST OF VANISHING STARS, THE BOOK OF LOST NAMES and THE WINEMAKER'S WIFE. Kristin, whose books have been translated into 29 languages, is also the co-founder and co-host of the popular web series and podcast Friends & Fiction. She lives in Orlando with her husband and son. Visit her at www.KristinHarmel.com.A Chicago-born writer based in Pittsburgh, PA, Marisel Vera is the author of The Taste of Sugar and If I Bring You Roses. Through her work, Vera explores the particular burdens that Puerto Ricans carry as colonial subjects of the most powerful country in the world.Moderator:Tracy Carr is the Mississippi Center for the Book Coordinator and the Library Services Director at the Mississippi Library Commission.