Oxford Conference for the Book returns Wednesday and boasts a program 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, editors, publishers and journalists over the years.
“Oxford has been a literary town for a long time,” said James Thomas, conference organizer and associate director for publication in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. “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 local talent, the conference is free and open to the public. Thomas began coordinating the conference in 2014. He said though some aspects of the 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.”
This year’s celebration began Tuesday at Off Square Books with a “pre conference warm-up” reading and book signing by Mississippi author Michael Farris Smith.
From then, the three-day conference continues with panels, lectures and discussions with sociologists, anthropologists, writers and scholars alike on the Ole Miss campus and in Oxford. The Oxford Conference for the Book is once again working with the 2018 Children’s Book Festival to encourage literacy among the young members of the LOU community with a scheduled reading by Matt de la Peña.
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 the conference will host a one-woman production about Fannye Cook, the famous Mississippi conservationist. The editors of the book the production is based on will be in attendance to answer audience questions.
The variety of this year’s topics, such as the Bohemian South, Latinos in the South and Affrilachian poets, allows for a diverse conference experience. Julian Randall, an Ole Miss MFA student, will moderate a panel about Affrilachian poets, a “hugely foundational” group of black poets from the Appalachian area. He said he appreciates that the Oxford Conference for the Book has allowed the distinct genre to have a platform.
“It’s important that we have spaces that exist for themselves and (don’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 he said 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 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 from his beginnings with the conference.
“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 credits his first conference with partially inspiring his literary ambitions and describes this return as something of a homecoming. He said 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.
Thomas said that as an undergraduate, he thought these conference events just sounded like more work but discovered after he went that they were amazing opportunities to interact and learn. He hopes 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.”
