Steve Soltis said Mississippi, and its people, are full of stories waiting to be told, and the inaugural New Narrative Festival at Mississippi State next week aims to help explore ways to tell them.
Soltis, a retired corporate communications professional who worked more than 20 years with Coca-Cola and UPS, spoke to the Starkville Rotary Club Monday about the festival. Soltis is a member of the advisory board for MSU’s Department of Communication.
“The driving objective, first and foremost, is to showcase the university, Dr. Forde’s department and the greater Starkville community as both conveners and curators of this changing narrative,” Soltis said, “and also to talk about what’s happening, why it’s different, how Mississippi has a role in this and where it’s going.”
MSU Professor and Head of the Department of Communication John Forde said Soltis helped birth the idea for the New Narrative Festival. He said Soltis, who hails from California and has worked much of his career in Atlanta, has taken a liking to the state and wants to find ways to explore how to better share the story of its impact on America.
“The whole idea of this festival is to really explore the ways we communicate,” Forde said. “In Steve’s case, there’s a special emphasis on Mississippi. He and I talk all the time and he’s really just fallen in love with Mississippi State and Mississippi, and all the contributions the state has made to society in general.”
The New Narrative Festival is set for April 13-14 at The Mill at MSU. Registration for the event, which includes three meals, musical performances and access to all sessions, is $185 for adults and $40 for students.
Soltis said the festival idea came from discussions with Forde about the changing media landscape and grew into talks about changes in the communication landscape as a whole.
“We’re seeing this huge, huge outburst of creativity and content creation,” he said. “We want to see what’s driving all this creativity, and what are the technologies that are going to converge and move it forward?”
The festival will include a broad range of speakers, including UPS CEO David Abney. Soltis said Abney hails from Greenwood, is a booster for MSU and owns a home in Starkville. Abney, he said is one of, if not the most influential business leader to emerge from Mississippi.
“His company, on any given day, handles 7 percent of the United States’ (Gross Domestic Product),” Soltis said. “They handle 3 percent of the global GDP. If the UPS system breaks down, the whole umbrella of commerce breaks down.”
Soltis said Abney will speak about the importance of communication in a global corporation, and how UPS uses communication to pass its values along to new generations of workers.
The festival will also feature Ken Askew from California. Soltis said Askew’s parents grew up in West Point and — as Baptist missionaries — were the first Americans in Hiroshima, Japan, after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city in August 1945.
Soltis said Askew has worked as a speechwriter for former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Georgia) and former U.S. President George H.W. Bush, and will talk about his experiences.
The festival will include many other speakers and topics, including musician Norbert Putnam, the impact of MSU women’s basketball, cartoonist Marshall Ramsey and a panel about the Netflix sports documentary “Last Chance U” featuring East Mississippi Community College President Thomas Huebner, football coach Buddy Stephens and documentary writer Drew Jubera.
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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