Headliners Michael Farris Smith and Ace Atkins will cap off a day of panel discussions, book signings, and activities celebrating southern literature at the first ever Possumtown Book Fest on Aug. 24.
The festival will feature eight literary panels every hour on the hour throughout the day, starting at 9 a.m., as well as a children’s program and local author showcase running concurrently during the morning.
Smith and Atkins will be featured on the final panel of the day at 4 p.m. The two writers are popular among Mississippi readers for their suspenseful southern noir novels.
Mystery writer Maya Corrigan, poet Kendall Dunkelberg, cookbook author Dale Gray, documentarian Anthony Thaxton, and novelist Deborah Johnson are also confirmed to appear at the Possumtown Book Fest.
In all, approximately two dozen nationally published authors are expected to participate at the Possumtown Book Fest. More authors will be announced in the coming weeks, and the panel schedule will be released no later than Aug. 17. All panels and activities are free and open to the public.
The Possumtown Book Fest will be held at the Columbus Arts Council’s Rosenzweig Arts Center at 501 Main Street and is being organized by Friendly City Books and the Friendly City Books Community Connection, a special project of the CREATE Foundation.
The Mississippi Humanities Council provided a $7,500 grant to the Friendly City Books Community Connection to support the educational programming at the event. Generous support has also been furnished by the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library System, the Friends of the Library and the Columbus-Lowndes Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Sales of festival author books will be conducted on site by Friendly City Books. Local authors with independently published books can apply to participate in the Author Showcase from 9 to 11:30 a.m. to promote their work. The application is open until Aug. 2 at friendlycitybooks.com/fest.
Author Announcements:
■ Michael Farris Smith is an award-winning writer whose novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, NPR, Southern Living, Garden & Gun, Oprah Magazine, Book Riot and numerous other outlets. He has also written the feature-film adaptations of his novels “Desperation Road” and “The Fighter,” titled for the screen as “Rumble Through the Dark.” His seventh book “Salvage This World” was published in 2023. Smith previously lived in Columbus and taught at Mississippi University for Women.
■ Ace Atkins is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author who started his writing career as a crime beat reporter in Florida. His 30th novel “Don’t Let the Devil Ride” was published on June 25. His previous novels include 11 books in the Quinn Colson series and multiple true-crime novels based on infamous crooks and killers. In 2010, he was chosen by Robert B. Parker’s family to continue the iconic Spenser series, adding 10 novels to the franchise.
■ Maya (Mary Ann) Corrigan combines her passion for food and detective stories in her Five-Ingredient Mysteries. The series features a café manager and her livewire grandfather, the Codger Cook, who solve murders in a historic town near the Chesapeake Bay. She has been featured in First for Women and Woman’s World. Before writing crime fiction, she taught American literature, writing and detective fiction at Northern Virginia Community College and Georgetown University.
■ Kendall Dunkelberg directs the Creative Writing low-residency MFA and undergraduate concentration, as well as the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium at Mississippi University for Women, where he is Chair of the Department of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy and Professor of English. He is the author of the textbook “A Writer’s Craft” and three collections of poetry, including “Barrier Island Suite,” based on the life of Mississippi artist Walter Anderson.
■ Dale Gray is the author of “South of Somewhere: Recipes and Stories from My Life in South Africa, South Korea & the American South (A Cookbook).” After graduating from Stellenbosch University in her native South Africa, she moved to South Korea to teach English and met her husband, a soldier from Mississippi. Her website TheDaleyPlate.com features recipes inspired by Korean and South African flavors along with Southern dishes. Her work has been featured in Martha Stewart, Saveur, Food 52, Cooking Light, Food & Wine, TheKitchn, Bake from Scratch and more, and her Instagram @TheDaleyPlate has over 200,000 followers.
■ Deborah Johnson is the author of “The Air Between Us,” which received the Mississippi Library Association Award for fiction, and “The Secret of Magic,” which received the 2015 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. She has been a translator and an editor, a broadcaster at Vatican Radio, and director of the Colom Foundation.
■ Beth Kander is a novelist and playwright with tangled roots in the Midwest and Deep South. Her works include several plays that have received critical acclaim in theaters nationwide, the children’s picture book “Do Not Eat This Book! Fun with Jewish Foods” and “Festivals,” the young adult scifi trilogy Original Syn and the forthcoming novel “I Made It Out of Clay,” which will be published in December. A former resident of Jackson, Miss., she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mississippi University for Women.
■ Anthony Thaxton has won awards as a television director, painter, educator, photographer, writer, musician and filmmaker, including the Southeast EMMY Award for Outstanding Documentary for “Walter Anderson: The Extraordinary Life and Art of The Islander.” He is a co-founding partner and ambassador of the Institute for Southern Storytelling at Mississippi College, where he was named 2019 Distinguished Art Alumnus of the Year. He is a graduate of the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science in Columbus, Miss.
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