It’s hard to resist comparing Katy Simpson Smith, a rising star in Mississippi’s literary firmament, to the iconic Eudora Welty — especially as she steps into the role of headlining the 35th annual Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium at Mississippi University for Women this week.

Simpson Smith served for several years as the Eudora Welty chair for southern literature at Millsaps College in Jackson, a city which both writers have called home.

In an even more surprising coincidence, Welty lived for a brief stint in the same house where Simpson Smith herself grew up.

“I like to imagine some essential spirit of hers still lingered in the rooms where I grew up,” Simpson Smith told The Dispatch in an interview.

Simpson Smith is the youngest Welty Symposium keynote speaker in recent memory. She has produced five books before the age of 40, and this will be her third appearance at the Welty Symposium.

“The Weeds,” her latest novel, was published in April by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Readers of her previous book “The Everlasting” will recognize the familiar setting of Rome, which both books share, but “The Weeds” is a wholly unique reading experience.

The two women at the heart of the story in “The Weeds” live parallel lives 150 years apart. Both are unnamed and have similar jobs to assist prominent scientists with studies of the plants found in the Roman Colosseum. The protagonists’ stories alternate in meticulously crafted prose poems organized according to Richard Deakin’s “Flora of the Colosseum of Rome,” a real publication from 1855 that chronicled over 400 plants in the ruins.

One of the unique identifiable traits of the modern day character in “The Weeds” is that she is from Jackson as well. In the book, she is inspired to pursue her own research project on the Mississippi Coliseum but struggles to be taken seriously in the male-dominated sphere of academia.

The other major character, who adds a historical perspective to the novel, has been forced to accept an apprenticeship and go on the marriage market, separating her from the woman she loves. Ultimately, both characters take their fates into their own hands with dramatic results.

Simpson Smith’s keynote will kick off the Welty Symposium on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in MUW’s Poindexter Hall.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

What does it mean to you to return to the Welty Symposium to give the keynote this year?

The Welty Symposium is such a special gathering of writers — my first visit to the conference resulted in lifelong friends and entrenched admirations — so to come back as a keynote speaker is an enormous honor. How lucky we are, as a state of writers and readers, to have one another as a community. I’m particularly excited by this year’s focus on Welty’s story “Circe” and the theme “The Transformative Magic of Story”; isn’t it true that the fictions we tell can turn us from sailors to pigs, and back again?

What is the meaning (or meanings) behind the title “The Weeds”?

“The Weeds” refers to the several hundred species of plants that the novel’s female narrators are in the process of cataloging — most of them small, unnoticed, seemingly inconsequential — but also to the women themselves. Despite being born 150 years apart, they’ve both grown up in societies that see them as unimportant, troublesome, out of place. A weed, of course, is just a plant growing where someone doesn’t want it.

How was the process of writing this book with its unique structure different from writing in a more traditional narrative?

It was both limiting and strangely freeing! I had the text of Richard Deakin’s botanical flora in front of me while I wrote, and I told myself I could only progress from one plant to the next, in order, alternating narrators. The beauty was that it wasn’t possible to run out of ideas; the novel demanded that the daisy come next, so there I was, obeying, writing about the daisy.

What led you to make one of your characters a native Mississippian abroad in Rome, and do you think that choice made a difference compared to other attributes the character could have?

I think there are a number of parallels between Jackson and Rome — a Global South kinship, along with rather dramatic changes in their civic fortunes. (Is someone out there already writing the book “The Rise and Fall of Jackson, Mississippi”?) What a Mississippi narrator brings to the story is a love of nature run rampant and an empathy for marginalized figures (both plant and human).

Can you tell us about your next book?

It was written during the pandemic, so it’s my version of an escapist beach read — perhaps the happiest novel I’ve written yet? The Mediterranean, seaside villas, spies, perhaps a murder…

Emily Liner is the owner of Friendly City Books, an independent bookstore and press in Columbus.