Oxford Conference for the Book returns on March 21 boasting a list of diverse panels and acclaimed writers, including headlining authors Martin Amis and Ann Beattie.
The three-day conference, which is celebrating its milestone 25th year, is presented by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss and Square Books. It is known for bringing together novelists and editors and publishers and journalists for years.
“Oxford has been a literary town for a long time,” conference organizer and associate director for publication in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture James Thomas said. “Conversation about the conference started way back when Ann Abadie and Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books, got together and started talking about putting together something like this.”
Bringing together novelists, journalists, poets and intellectuals from far and wide as well as featuring local talent, the conference, which is free and open to the public, will kick off on Tuesday, March 20, at Off Square Books with a reading and book signing by Mississippi author Michael Farris Smith.
From then, the three-day conference will continue with panels, lectures and discussions with sociologists, anthropologists, writers and scholars alike at various locations on the Ole Miss campus and in Oxford. Held in conjunction with Oxford Conference for the Book, the 2018 Children’s Book Festival will encourage literacy among the young members of the LOU community with a reading by Matt de la Peña.
Thomas began coordinating the conference in 2014. Though some aspects of Oxford Conference for the Book have changed, the main goal, bringing in writers from across the country and allowing them to interact with students and members of the LOU community, has remained the same.
“[Oxford Conference for the Book] reinforces the notion that Oxford is a particularly literary city,” Thomas said. “It brings both readers and writers to Oxford, allowing them to share ideas with each other.”
Many changes have been added over the years to draw more people to the event. It has expanded to include films, plays, and much more. In fact, this year, a one-woman production about Fanny Cook, a famous Mississippi conservationist, will be performed at the conference. The editors of the book that the production is based on will be in attendance, allowing those interested to ask them questions.
The diversity of this year’s topics, such as the Bohemian South, Latinos in the South and Affrilachian poets, allows for a varied conference experience. Julian Randall, an Ole Miss MFA student, will be moderating the panel about Affrilachian poets, a “hugely foundational” group of black poets from the Appalachian area. He appreciates that the Oxford Conference for the Book has allowed the distinct genre to have a platform at the conference.
“It’s important that we have spaces that exist for themselves and doesn’t exist against a narrative. The Affrilachian poet panel is going to be an incredible example of that,” Randall said. “Yes, black people come from cities, but they also come from mountains, and what does that context speak to? It wasn’t created in opposition to black urban narratives but in support of black Appalachian narratives.”
Randall himself is a big fan of a couple of writers on the panel, like Frank X. Walker and Kelly Norman Ellis, and considers being able to moderate a wonderful opportunity. Oxford Conference for the Book is one of the reasons Randall chose to come here for his degree, something that went against the “anti-intellectualism narrative that is seen in the South.”
“I think it’s nice that we have these literary spaces that are dedicated to thinking about poets in a southern context,” he said. “There’s so much about southern politics that is overlooked.”
Ole Miss professor and Mississippi Poet Laureate Beth Ann Fennelly is looking forward to bringing her students to the conference, allowing them to meet the authors of the books they’re reading.
“It’s a great opportunity for them to ask questions about craft and technique,” she said.
Fennelly will be participating in the conference as well.
Jonathan Miles, a prolific writer and former Oxford resident, will be returning to the Velvet Ditch for the conference, coming full circle.
“I attended the first [Oxford] Conference for the Book as a scruffy kid living in Oxford, so there’s something lovely and circular about presenting a new novel at the conference a quarter century later,” he said.
Miles attributes his first conference as partially inspiring his literary ambitions and describes this return as something of a homecoming. He said that his time in Oxford was instrumental in leading his journey to become a writer.
“Subtract my years in Oxford, and I think you subtract my life as a writer. It was that formative,” he said. “But Oxford’s reading community had as much to do with it as the writing community.”
Miles remembers Oxford as a town “where people read hungrily and passionately,” and these people were not just professors and students.
“I’ve lived and traveled many places since leaving Oxford but have yet to find any place where books are so central to the diet,” he said. “For book lovers in the Oxford and Ole Miss communities, it’s like Mardi Gras – a multi-day celebration of reading and writing, an annual rite for binging on culture.”
Oxford’s reputation as a literary town is “solidified and amplified” with a conference like Oxford Conference for the Book, according to Miles, a sentiment shared by Thomas.
As an undergraduate, Thomas said that he remembered seeing lectures happening across campus, and he thought they just sounded like more work but discovered after he went that it was amazing opportunity to interact and learn more. He hopes that community members will attend the conference and discover the same thing.
“These opportunities exist for us to learn,” he said. “They are about things that we may not have thought about before or dealt with, and it’s a cool opportunity to learn something new.”
Devna Bose - Journalism 377 