Live Performance Series

Sarah-SoonLing Blackburn is an educator, speaker, and writer. Sarah was born in Bangkok, Thailand into a mixed-race Malaysian Chinese and white American family.  Sarah moved to the Deep South in 2009. 

Her experiences first as a classroom 

teacher and later as a teacher educator inform her beliefs about the role that education can and must play in the realization of social justice.

She owes very much to her ancestors.

Sarah spent most of her years in the classroom teaching third and fourth grade. She was Teacher of the Year at Lakeside Upper Elementary School in Lake Village, AR. 

Dawn Denham is a writer and teacher living in north central Mississippi. Her nonfiction work has appeared in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, After the Art, American Writers Review, Zone 3, Entropy, Waterwheel Review, and as the inaugural Why I Write feature in Poets and Writers.  She is co-author of Writing Together: Transforming Your Writing in a Writing Group, the first book published on creative writing groups. 

Dawn has an undergraduate degree in Voice Performance from The Eastman School of Music, a master’s degree in teaching writing and rhetoric from the University of Arizona, and an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A transplant to the Deep South, Dawn teaches writing full time at the University of Mississippi.

Eliot Parker is the author of four thriller novels and two collections of short stories. His recent thriller A FINAL CALL, was named a "Best Book to Discover in 2022" by Kirkus Magazine and was a finalist for the Hawthorne Award for Fiction. His thriller novel FRAGILE BRILLANCE was a finalist for the SIBA Book Prize in 2016 and he also received the PenCraft and Feathered Quill Book Awards for his short story collection SNAPSHOTS. 

His latest short story collection, TABLE FOR TWO, will be released in November 2024 by and his new thriller, DOUBLE-CROSSED, was released in September 2024 by Rough Edges Press. A recipient of the West Virginia Literary Merit Award, Eliot teaches writing at the University of Mississippi. 

Gerry Wilson is the author of That Pinson Girl (Regal House Publishing, 2024) and a story collection, Crosscurrents and Other Stories (Press 53, 2015).  

A seventh generation Mississippian, Gerry grew up in the red clay hills she writes about in That Pinson Girl and came of age during the turbulent civil rights era. She draws heavily on her Mississippi roots in much of her fiction. 

Gerry lives in Jackson, Mississippi, with her husband, Austin Wilson, a poet and retired Millsaps College professor. 

Erin Austen Abbott is the author of three creative non-fiction books, with a fourth out in the spring of 2026 on Running Press Books. Erin has contributed to several other books, including the Oxford travel guide for Wild Sam, Paris by Design, and Truth, Love, & Clean Cutlery. 

Erin wrote for the blog Design*Sponge for many years and has contributed work to 20+ magazines and blogs over the years. Erin also works as a creative consultant for writers, small business owners, and other creatives. She has lived back in her home state of Mississippi since 2005.

Kellene O’Hara has been published in The Fourth River, Marathon Literary Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Her writing has been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Best Small Fictions. 

She has an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. She teaches writing at the University of Mississippi. Find her on Twitter @KelleneOHara, Instagram @KelleneWrites, and online at kelleneohara.com.

Barbara Shoup is the author of nine novels for adults and young adults, most recently An American Tune and About Grace, as well as a memoir about writing, A Commotion in Your Heart, and Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process. 

Shoup is the Writer-in-Residence at the Indiana Writers Center and a faculty member at Art Workshop International, in Assisi Italy. She hosts the Substack newsletter Book Pilgrim. 

Chivas Sandage is at work on THE WIND BLEW THROUGH US: Love, Murder, & Justice in Texas, forthcoming in hardcover from the University of Texas Press.  Chivas won the 2021 Claire Keyes Poetry Award, judged by poet Afaa Michael Weaver, for a group of 8 poems from Summertime in America, her recently completed second collection. 

Her essays and poems have appeared in the Texas Observer, Ms. Magazine, Hartford Courant, The Rumpus, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. She is a digital columnist at Ms. Magazine and her column, Ms. Muse, features contemporary feminist poets and essays on the intersection of poetry, politics, and our lives.

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sandage grew up primarily in Houston, Texas. 

LaToya Faulk has a BA in English Literature and a MA in Rhetoric and Writing from Michigan State University. She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Mississippi. 

She received a 2022 Pushcart special mention for the essay “In Search of Homeplace.” Her work has been published in Scalawag, Southwest Review, Amherst College’s The Common, and Splinter Magazine's Think Local series. 

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