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April 23-25, 2027

Word of South

Pat MacEnulty

Pat MacEnulty is the author of a historical novel series, crime novels, memoirs, a short story collection, children’s plays, and most recently, the historical coming-of-age novel, Cinnamon Girl (Livingston Press, Sept. 2023). She has a Ph.D. in English from the Florida State University and graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Florida, where she […]

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Nathaniel Rich

Nathaniel Rich is the author of Losing Earth, a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Award and the winner of awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the American Institute of Physics. His most recent book, Second Nature, longlisted for the PEN/E.O Wilson, features the story “Dark Waters,” which was adapted into a film starring Mark […]

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Michael Bakan

Michael Bakan is Professor of Ethnomusicology, Head of the World Music Ensembles Program, and Affiliated Faculty in Asian Studies in the College of Music at Florida State University, where he directs the Sekaa Gong Hanuman Agung Balinese Gamelan. He has performed with everyone from George Clinton and the legendary funk band Parliament to John Cage, […]

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Leyla McCalla

Leyla McCalla finds inspiration from her past and present, whether it is her Haitian heritage or her adopted home of New Orleans, she — a bilingual multi-instrumentalist, and alumna of the Grammy award-winning African-American string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops — has risen to produce a distinctive sound that reflects the union of her roots […]

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Leon Timbo

Some write music as a creative release. Others feel compelled to perform. For country-soul singer-songwriter Leon Timbo, music is used as a form of growth and healing. Growing up the son of two pastors in Jacksonville, Florida, music was integrated into his life from the very start, as a way to communicate spiritual experience. At […]

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Kyle Kimbrell

From the swinging front-porch blues sound of “Toothache” to the Gram Parsons cosmic country realm of “Lockjaw Fever,” Kyle Kimbrell delivers a musical message for the nervous, glass-half-empty folks with enough room for a hopeful change in perspective. Despite the storms, hypochondria, and paranoid sense of simple things going wrong, Kimbrell still tells us we’ll […]

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Kerry James Evans

Kerry James Evans is the author of Bangalore (Copper Canyon). The recipient of a 2015 NEA Fellowship and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, his poems have appeared in Agni, Narrative, New England Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals. He lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where he teaches in the MFA program at Georgia College & State University and serves as the poetry […]

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