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April 24-26, 2026
Mark Kurlansky is the author of 31 published books, spanning fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books. His work includes The New York Times best-sellers Salt and Food of a Younger Land. His book Cod, also a best-seller, won the 1999 James Beard Award for Food Writing and the Glenfiddich Award. Mark’s career as a writer began […]
Michael Farris Smith is an award-winning writer whose novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, NPR, Southern Living, Garden & Gun, Oprah Magazine, Book Riot, and numerous other outlets, and have been named Indie Next, Barnes & Noble Discover, and Amazon Best of the Month selections. As a screenwriter, he scripted […]
Kimmery Martin is an emergency medicine doctor, born and raised in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. A lifelong literary nerd, she reviews books, interviews authors, and works extensively with the library foundation in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she resides with her husband and three young children. Kimmery will be appearing at Word of South with […]
King Solomon Hicks grew up in Harlem “around a lot of great musicians.” That certainly shows on HARLEM, an 11-song salute to those roots — and how the 24-year-old guitarist and singer has turned them into his own fierce and distinctive style over the years. The set, produced by multiple Grammy Award winner Kirk Yano […]
Kristen Arnett is the queer Floridian author of With Teeth: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted […]
Jill Criswell is a writer of young adult fantasy. Born and raised in the swamps of northeastern Florida, she received degrees in English and Psychology and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida. Her greatest passion, besides reading and writing, is traveling the world—she’s been to fifty countries across six continents, […]
Ivy Odom is a Recipe Tester/Developer at Meredith Corporation’s Meredith Food Studios in Birmingham, Alabama. Outside of recipe development and testing, Ivy hosts the Southern Living digital video series, Hey Y’all, among other instructional digital videos for Meredith’s food and lifestyle brands. Ivy is also the host of The Southern Living Show, a television series […]
With almost two million books in print in fifteen different languages, Karen White is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and currently writes what she refers to as ‘grit lit’—Southern women’s fiction—and has also expanded her horizons into writing a mystery series set in Charleston, South Carolina. She is a graduate of […]
Ray is an American writer whose subject is often nature. She is author of five books of literary nonfiction and a volume of eco-poetry. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana, where she was the William Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer 2014. She is a 2015 inductee into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. […]
The chorus to the title track on the new Hayes Carll album, What It Is, is a manifesto. What it was is gone forever / What it could be God only knows.What it is is right here in front of me / and I’m not letting go. He’s embracing the moment. Leaving the past where […]