From 9 a.m. until 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, more than 150 authors will be participating in interviews, panel discussions and book readings. The festival is open to all and free of charge. Beverly Lowry: Who Killed These Girls! Beverly Lowry wrote six novels and three nonfiction books between 1978 and 2008. Who Killed These Girls is her fourth nonfiction book. Cold Case; The Yogurt Shop Murders will be published in October. The fictional town of Eunola was the setting for her first two novels, Come Back, LollyRay, and Emma Blue. Lowry states that, although the state wasn’t named explicitly, it didn’t take an archaeologist to find out which one it was and that Eunola was based on Greenville, Miss. “15 years later, my sixth novel The Track of Real Desires was set in Eunola. It continued on the characters from earlier novels and named Mississippi its home state.” Lowry has also written feature articles and essays about Mississippi. Lowry attended the University of Mississippi and earned a bachelor’s from Memphis State University. She has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has lived in New York City, Houston, Los Angeles, Missoula and Mont. ; Washington, D.C., Buffalo, N.Y., among other places. For many years, she was an English professor at George Mason University in Virginia. She now teaches fiction writing at University of Houston at Victoria. She lives in Austin. Lowry says, “I would recommend Jesmyn Ward’s novel, Salvage the Bones for its tautness, emotional intensity, as well its thunderous prose and both of Brad Watson’s story collections.” I have not yet read Miss Jane, his novel, but I look forward to it. He is a great talent, who is not afraid to take risks and is able to focus long and high. Although there are many others that I would recommend, these two works resonate particularly.” Jeff Zentner: The Serpent King. This year, Jeff Zentner published his first novel, Serpent King. He is a Tennessee Teen Rock Camp musician and inspired to write for young adults. He has recorded with Nick Cave, Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry. Zentner has also recorded and written his own music. He performed at the Juke Joint Festival 2008 in Clarksdale. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his son and wife. Mississippi readers will find Jesmyn Ward, a National Book Award-winning novel entitled Salvage the Bones, a great literary inspiration and favorite author. It is the most beautiful combination of brutality and beauty I have ever seen, and it’s something I only saw in The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Salvage the Bones is Mississippi in every way — sweat, humidity, blood red clay and tall pines,” Zentner says. Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins won’t publish Angela Thomas’s debut novel The Hate Ugive until 2017, but Fox 2000 studio has already acquired the film rights to The Hate Ugive. Amandla Stenberg, Hunger Games actress, will star. Thomas, a Jackson native, said that Jackson and the surrounding area had a significant influence on the setting. We Need Diverse Books awarded the Walter Dean Meyers Grant 2015 to Thomas as an initiator. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Creative Writing from Belhaven University. As a teenager rapper, she also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Creative Writing. I recommend Jeff Zentner’s young adult novel, The Serpent King. The book is set in Tennessee but Mississippians will feel at home with the atmosphere, language, and heart of The Serpent King. Rural Mississippi could be home to the characters. Thomas says that it’s a Faulkner novel for young adults. W. Ralph Eubanks. The House at the End of the Road. The Story of Three Generations of Interracial Families in the American South. W. Ralph Eubanks’ essays, criticism, and articles have appeared in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal as well as WIRED, WIRED, and The New Yorker. For 18 years, he was director of publishing at Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and editor of Virginia Quarterly Review, University of Virginia. For his memoir, Ever Is a Long Time : A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past, Eubanks was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. He is currently the Eudora Worldy Visiting Scholar for Southern Studies at Millsaps College. Eubanks earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Mississippi, and his master’s degree in English language literature and literature from the University of Michigan. Eubanks was raised in Mount Olive, Miss. Eubanks currently resides in Washington, D.C. with his wife, and their three children. It is difficult to recommend novels that will be included at the festival. Tom Piazza’s A Free State is my favorite book. It is about race and identity which are two of the most important topics in my nonfiction writing. Eubanks says that A Free State is a book about the history of American mistrelry and that he likes the way it incorporates history into the narrative. “Brad Watson’s Miss Jane is a fictionalized rendering Watson’s aunt’s life, but I was also impressed by how much research he did about Jane Chisholm’s medical condition. It is set in Mercury, a fictional place that is a substitute for Meridian, so the book has a real feeling of place. Tom Piazza, A Free State Tom Piazza is a writer of 12 fiction and nonfiction books. He is also the author of Why New Orleans Matters and A Free State. Devil Sent The Rain contains essays on Mississippi music and includes articles about Charley Patton, the Mississippi blues patriarch, and Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman. He was a main writer on HBO’s drama series TREME and won a Grammy Award in 2005 for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues. A Musical Journey. He currently resides in New Orleans. I recommend Lee Clay Johnson’s wild debut novel, Nitro Mountain. It’s full of surprises, a wide range of characters and a love for music. They also understand the dark places that people can go through in their quest to find peace and redemption. Piazza says it’s a fantastic debut and Lee Johnson is definitely one to watch.” Rivers Michael Farris Smith, Rivers Michael Farris Smith received the Mississippi Library Association’s 2014 Mississippi Author Award in Fiction. Desperation Road (2018) and The Fighter (2018) are the next novels. Mississippi State University awarded Smith his bachelor’s degree. Smith attended William Carey University to earn his master’s degree, and University of Southern Mississippi to get his doctorate. He is an associate professor at Mississippi University for Women in English. He teaches Southern literature, modernism, and fiction writing. Smith spent time in France and Switzerland before he came to MUW. Smith was born in Mississippi, and he currently resides in Columbus with his wife and their two daughters. “I recommend many authors, all of them in one place. Akashic Books’ Mississippi Noir anthology is a great collection of gritty, dark Mississippi stories. Smith says that this is exactly how we like them.” RaShell Smith-Spears, Losing Her Religion RaShell Smith-Spears has published creative work in various journals, anthologies, and short stories A Story of Hunger, and Robert Greenfield, A Vampire Story in Mississippi’s Black Magnolias: A Literary Journal. Her most recent publication was the Mississippi Noir short story, Losing Her Religion. It was edited by Tom Franklin. Spelman College gave her her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English, respectively. She also received her master’s of fine art in creative writing from University of Memphis. The University of Missouri-Columbia awarded her doctoral degree in 19th Century American Literature. She is currently a professor at Jackson State University’s Department of English and Modern Foreign Languages. Smith-Spears has two children and is married. “Carolyn J. Brown, the author of Song of My Life: Margaret Walker’s Biography, is doing important work in bringing Margaret Walker into our literary spotlight. Walker is an important literary figure in Mississippi culture, and we must acknowledge her contributions. I believe Carolyn J. Smith-Spears believes Brown is doing this. Jay McInerney, Bright, Precious Days Jay McInerney has written 12 books, nine of them fiction, and his most recent book, Bright, Precious Days. Time Magazine listed his first bestseller, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), among the nine most influential novels of the 20th century. McInerney’s novel The Good Life was also awarded the Grand Prix Literaire at Deauville Film Festival 2007. The New York Times named How It Ended (2009) as one of the 10 best books. It is a collection of short stories that McInerney has written throughout his career. McInerney is currently the author of a Town & Country Magazine wine column, while he also wrote one for The Wall Street Journal from 2010 to 2014. He wrote a monthly column on wine for Conde Nast’s House and Garden from 1996 to 2007. Many of these columns were collected in Bacchus and Me (2000, 2006) and A Hedonist In The Cellar (2006). McInerney was awarded the James Beard MFK Fisher Award in 2006 for his outstanding writing on food and wine. McInerney, the father of Barrett and Maisie, has been married to Anne Randolph Hearst. He divides his time between Bridgehampton (N.Y.), Nashville, and New York City. McInerney states, “I would recommend Robert Olen Butler’s Perfume River Mississippi readers.” “Butler is a great novelist, and his work hauntingly lyrical.”_x000D