John Rash of the Southern Documentary Project has a new short film called Nomad Chapter, which profiles Diarra Leggett, owner of Boomerang Bookshop: Nomad Chapter, a North Carolina-based bookmobile. View it on the Center’s documentary media site Mississippi Stories, whose Mississippi-based storytellers tell the stories of people and communities around the globe.
Written By Grace Nelson With graduation quickly approaching, the students who are attaining their master’s degrees in Southern Studies are busy mapping out their futures. Here’s a quick look at what’s in store for our soon-to-be graduates. Jacqueline Sahagian: After graduation, Jacqui will to move back… Read More >
Living Blues #254 (April/May 2018) features the duo of Warner Williams and Jay Summerour on the cover. One of the last great East Coast blues duos, Williams (age 87) and Summerour do it the old-school way.
Southern Studies MA Students to Present Projects on May 1 On Tuesday, May 1 at 7pm, the Center will host Documentary Thesis Presentations for Southern Studies M.A. students Rachel Childs, Rebecca Lauck Cleary, and Victoria De Leone. The event will be at the Burns-Belfry Museum and Multicultural Center, 710 Jackson Avenue East in Oxford.
Do you think you might be the next Richard Wright? Or can channel your inner O’Connor with a flick of a pen? If so, you should enter your stories and poems for consideration in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture’s annual Eudora Welty Awards. Students must be Mississippi residents. The competition is open to… Read More >
Students in Dr. Jessie Wilkerson’s Southern Studies 506 Graduate Seminar in Southern LGBTQ History and Oral History Methods will present an oral history performance Wednesday, April 25 at 7pm at Burns-Belfry Museum and Multicultural Center. The event is free and open to the public, and a reception will follow the performance.
The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters has awarded Center publication The Mississippi Encyclopedia its 2018 Special Achievement Award, and John T. Edge, Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, has received the MIAL Nonfiction award for his book The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South.
Written by Grace Nelson The film industry is achieving big things as this year’s 17th annual Tribeca Film Festival is set to premiere 75 new films. Adam Gussow, University of Mississippi associate professor of English and Southern studies, is among the stars of the festival and will attend the Friday (April 20) premiere of “Satan… Read More >
On Tuesday, April 10 at 5:30 pm in Barnard Observatory, journalist Emily Yellin and photographer Darius B. Williams will give a public talk on Striking Voices, their multimedia journalism project based on in-depth, video interviews with Memphis sanitation workers who went on strike in 1968, and their wives and children. Martin Luther King was in town standing up for their cause when he was killed in Memphis 50 years ago.
In honor of the activism of many children and teenagers across the nation, we share two entries from The Mississippi Encyclopedia, one on the Children’s Crusade of Jackson, by historian Daphne Chamberlain, and another on activist Brenda Travis, by Ted Ownby. All photos are from the Moncrief Photograph Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and document activism in Hattiesburg.