A series of biographies and memoirs that explore all aspects of contemporary American life and preserve the ineffable in the human experience.
For more information or to submit a proposal, contact acquisitions editor Lisa McMurtray.
Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography
Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was an American original—a luminous literary theorist, an erratic genius, and an analyst par excellence of human obsession and compulsion. The scope of his literary achievements and ...
Deep Roots, Broken Branches
Best known for her award-winning book The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War, historian Victoria Bynum turns now to her own history in this multigenerational American saga spanning from ...
All the Things We Didn't Say
Nominee for the 2025 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Life Writing
In this poignant and introspective dual memoir, Marion Garrard Barnwell embarks on a deeply personal journey. Inspired ...
Larry Brown
Winner of the 2011 Eudora Welty Prize
Larry Brown (1951–2004) was unique among writers who started their careers in the late twentieth century. Unlike most of them—his friends Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Ric ...
The Steps We Take
Chosen as Mississippi's 2024 Great Read for Adults by the Mississippi Center for the Book
Ellen Ann Fentress is a veteran writer for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She’s also a ...
To Dance, to Live
Thalia Mara’s story spans the history of dance in the twentieth century and the rise of the arts in her adopted city of Jackson, Mississippi. As an adolescent Mara (1911–2003) studied with renowned Russian tea ...
With Hawks and Angels
With Hawks and Angels: Episodes from a Southern Life chronicles the fortunate life of a man born in the Cajun country of Louisiana and his interaction with the three distinct parts of his home state: ...
Becoming Ezra Jack Keats
Winner of the 2024 Adult Nonfiction Award from the Mississippi Library Association
Becoming Ezra Jack Keats offers the first complete biography of acclaimed children’s author and illustrator Ezra Jack K ...
Political Animal
Named a 2024 Honorable Mention Book by the Louisiana Library Association
During Mardi Gras 1973, Stewart Butler (1930–2020) fell in love with Alfred Doolittle—a wealthy socialite and schizophrenic from San ...
The Mama Chronicles
Winner of the 2022 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Life Writing
Growing up in the Delta town of Yazoo City, Mississippi, Teresa Nicholas believed that she and her country-born and -bred ...