Beth Ann Fennelly is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi. She directs the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi where she teaches poetry and nonfiction writing. Her first book of poetry, Open House, won the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize and the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and was a Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Pick. It was reissued by W.W. Norton in 2009. Her second poetry collection, Tender Hooks, and her third, Unmentionables, were published by W.W. Norton in 2004 and 2008. She also published a book of nonfiction, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother (Norton), in 2006. The Tilted World, the novel she co-authored with her husband, Tom Franklin, published in 2013 (HarperCollins), is an Indie Next pick and has been translated into five languages. Her forthcoming book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, will be published by W. W. Norton in October. She also writes essays on travel, culture, and design for Country Living, Southern Living, AFAR, Garden and Gun, The Oxford American, and others. She and her husband live in Oxford with their three children.
Beth Ann Fennelly
Plenary Event
Saturday, March 4, 2017
Keynote Speaker
Jeannine Hall Gailey
Friday, March 3, 2017
Jeannine Hall Gailey recently served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006), She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books, 2011), Unexplained Fevers (New Binary Press, 2013), The Robot Scientist's Daughter (Mayapple Press, 2015), and Field Guide to the End of the World (Moon City Press, 2016), winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize. Her work has been featured on NPR's The Writer's Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, and Prairie Schooner.
Plenary Event
Lee Rozelle is the author of Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones: Ecocriticism and the Liminal from Invisible Man to The Walking Dead and Ecosublime: Environmental Awe and Terror from New World to Oddworld. He publishes scholarly articles in journals such as Twentieth-Century Literature, ISLE, Critical Studies, Canadian Literature, Studies in the Novel, and South Central Review.
Rozelle has presented academic papers in such places as the Sorbonne, Tsinghua University in Beijing, Dogus University in Istanbul, the Warsaw School of Social Psychology, and Boston University. He delivered plenary addresses at the 10th Annual New Voices Conference at Georgia State University and the ASLE-UK First Biennial Graduate Conference at the University of Glasgow.
Jeannine Hall Gailey
Dr. Lee Rozelle
Saturday, March 4, 2017
Brandi George’s first collection of poetry, Gog (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) won the gold medal in the 2015 Florida Book Awards. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Best New Poets 2010, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Columbia Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, and Prairie Schooner, also winning first place in the Dana Awards and the Zone 3 Poetry Awards. Brandi has been awarded residencies at Hambidge Center for the Arts and the Hill House Institute for Sustainable Living, Art & Natural Design, and she attended the Sewanee Writer’s Conference as a Tennessee Williams Scholar.
Plenary Event
Brandi George
Thursday March 2, 2017, The Thirsty Hippo
