W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of When It’s Darkness on the Delta: How America’s Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land , describing how the Mississippi Delta is often faulted for the sins of the South. But buried beneath the politics and white-washed histories lies the Delta’s true story. Eubanks will be a guest of Thacker Mountain Radio Hour.

Corky Siegel is known internationally as one of the world’s great blues harmonica players, keyboardists and songwriters. The two-time Emmy Award winner and member of the Chicago Blues Hall of Fame joins Thacker Mountain Radio Hour live on-stage at HOMEGROWN 2026.

The Veal Brothers began their gospel music career in 1975, singing in older churches in and around their home of Gloster, MS, a small town in the southwestern part of the state. The group has established their own record label, Prosperity Records. Their latest album is Live at Home, an uplifting set of tunes that features hot guitar, horns and the group’s incomparable harmonies. They’ll perform alongside Thacker Mountain Radio Hour.

Honey Parker is an award-winning advertising creative, published author, director, screenwriter, stand-up comic...what can't she do? Alongside the Arts of Hancock County, Honey will emcee HOMEGROWN's first-ever live-mic Story Slam. The theme is "Surprise"!

Attorney Brehm Bell shows his dedication to his neighbors in Bay St. Louis and along the Mississippi Coast through his work and community involvement. He will share his groundbreaking oral history project, Roots to Rockets at HOMEGROWN 2026. The the piece recognizes those who sacrificed their homes so that the 125,000 acre Stennis Space Center--a jewel in the crown of the Mississippi Gulf Coast--could be built.

Ellen Ann Fentress writes about Deep South politics and culture, looking at how big truths pulse in individual stories. A Visiting Writer in the Mississippi University for Women's creative-writing MFA program, she will lead a “Wordshop” at HOMEGROWN 2026 - a hands-on creative writing session not to be missed.

Ron Ladner shares the deeply personal, often humorous, and always heartfelt journey behind the iconic Gulf Coast restaurant, Shaggy’s, that became a beacon of comfort and hope. More than a memoir, this book is a celebration of spirit—the kind that rises after hurricanes, business risks, and life’s unexpected turns.

Jason Reynolds is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of many award-winning books, including Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks, All American Boys (with Brendan Kiely), Long Way Down, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (with Ibram X. Kendi), and Stuntboy. The recipient of a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, an NAACP Image Award, and multiple Coretta Scott King honors, Reynolds is also the 2020-2022 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He has appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Late Night with Seth Meyers, CBS Sunday Morning, Good Morning America, and other media outlets. He is on faculty at Lesley University, for the Writing for Young People MFA Program and lives in Washington, DC.

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones. She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.

Marcelle Bienvenu is a cookbook author and food writer who has been preparing Cajun and Creole dishes since the 1960s. She has written for The Times Picayune, Time-Life Books, and has been featured in Garden & Gun, Food & Wine, Saveur, Southern Living, Redbook, and more.

Dale Gray is a South African-born author and food blogger known for her unique culinary journey. Her debut cookbook, South of Somewhere, features a blend of flavors from Korea and the American South. She has contributed to publications such as Martha Stewart, Saveur, and Southern Living.

Melissa M. Martin's first book, Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou, was named a Best New Cookbook by Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, NPR, The Splendid Table, Eater, and Epicurious, among others. Martin has been nominated twice as Best Chef South by the Beard Foundation.

Phillip Ashley Rix is an award-winning chocolatier, founder of Memphis-based Phillip Ashley Chocolates. In 2014, FORBES Magazine named Phillip Ashley the “Real Life Willy Wonka.” In February 2020, he competed as a finalist on Food Network’s Chopped Sweets and later that year, his brand was named to Oprah’s Favorite Things List.

Brooke Champagne is an award-winning author and essayist from New Orleans. Her debut essay collection, Nola Face: A Latina's Life in the Big Easy was published in 2024. She has been recognized with the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay.

Now director of grants at the Mississippi Arts Commission and a host of MPB’s The Mississippi Arts Hour, Lauren Rhoades started Mississippi's first fermentation company and helmed the Eudora Welty House & Garden. Her debut memoir, Split the Baby: A Memoir in Pieces, was published in June 2025.

A Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Texas at Austin with a special emphasis on race, immigration and American Jewish history, Stuart Rockoff served as the historian at the Institute of Southern Life, and, in 2013, became executive director of the Mississippi Humanities Council.

Jordan LaHaye Fontenot’s work as a writer and editor is an ongoing exploration of how the past interacts with the present, in a place where tradition reigns. Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie is an investigative memoir that follows her journey as she unravels the mysteries surrounding the 1983 kidnapping and murder of her great grandfather, Aubrey LaHaye in Mamou, Louisiana.

A former English teacher and journalist, Johnnie Bernhard’s nonfiction work has appeared in Suburban Reporter of Houston, World Oil Magazine, The Mississippi Press, and the Cowbird-NPR production on small town America, among others. She has written four award-winning novels and contributed to seven anthologies.

Alexander Blevens is an Air Force veteran and a retired orthopedic surgeon who lives and writes on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. His latest award-winning novel, Arkansas Black, is loosely based on his family’s early twentieth-century ancestral roots on a farm in Northwest Arkansas.

Max Hipp is a teacher, writer, and musician from Mississippi. He teaches American Literature and Contemporary Literature at the University of Mississippi and has published works in various literary journals, including Black Warrior Review and SmokeLong Quarterly. He received the 2025 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award in Fiction for his writing.

Michael Farris Smith’s novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, NPR, Southern Living, and more. He scripted the feature-film adaptations of two of his novels, titled Rumble Through the Dark for the screen His band, MFS & The Smokes, released the record Lostville, which was produced by Grammy nominee Jimbo Mathus.

Nadia Alexis, is a poet, writer, and photographer born to Haitian immigrants in Harlem. She is the author of the hybrid poetry and photography collection, Beyond the Watershed, which was also a finalist for the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Prize in Poetry and longlisted for the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award. She has been named one of Poets & Writers’ 2026 Ten Best Debut Poets.

Dr. Megan Holt is the Executive Director for One Book One New Orleans and the Words & Music Literary Festival. She received the 2014 Literacy Champion of Greater New Orleans award. In 2015 she was named one of Gambit Weekly’s “40 Under 40” and New Orleans Magazine’s “People to Watch.” In 2021, she gave a TEDx Talk titled “Becoming Part of the Story” on her journey to becoming an advocate for adult literacy.

Born and raised in New Orleans, Skye Jackson writes about love, femininity and the challenges of navigating our modern world as a young Black woman. Her work has appeared in Palette Poetry, The Southern Review, RHINO, RATTLE, and elsewhere. Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected her poem "can we touch your hair?" for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project Anthology.

C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut collection, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking is now available from Acre Books. He’s the author of three chapbooks, most recently American Cavewall Sonnets. He’s the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award in poetry.

Addie Citchens' work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and other publications. Her blues history work features prominently in Mississippi Folklife, and she has been heard on The Mississippi Arts Hour on Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Her short story “That Girl” won the O. Henry Prize. Dominion is her first novel.

Fiction writer and poet, Olivia Clare Friedman, is the author of four books. Her most recent is a book of poems entitled An Arm Fixed to a Wing, published by LSU Press. In fiction, she is a recipient of an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award.

From Tupelo, Mississippi, Minrose Gwin began her writing career as a journalist and later taught at universities across the country. She is the author of award-winning novels The Queen of Palmyra, Promise, The Accidentals, and Beautiful Dreamers. Her memoir, Wishing for Snow, is about the collision of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life.

Sheila Sundar is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi. Her writing has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New Orleans with her husband and their three children. Habitations is her debut novel.

Natalie Guess earned her certification in Health and Wellness from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN) in New York. A longtime advocate of a plant-based diet, she has championed its benefits for overall well-being in her children's books, The Biggest, The Oldest, The Strongest... All Eat Plants, and The Field of Greens: Fueling Up for the Big Game, out in 2025.

Beth Kander is a USA Today best-selling novelist with tangled roots in the Midwest and Deep South. She is the author of I MADE IT OUT OF CLAY, her adult debut, as well as several books for younger readers. The granddaughter of immigrants, her work often explores how worlds old and new intertwine—or collide.

A librarian and former English teacher, Andrea followed up her first book, I Mustache You to Read with Me, with a sequel, I Just Want to Read! She wrote The New Orleans Saints Alphabet and Southern Jokes for Southern Kids. Her articles have appeared in The Sea Coast Echo, Mississippi Libraries, and Gulf Coast Parents & Kids Magazine.

Susan Cushman has written and published five books, including novels John and Mary Margaret and Cherry Bomb, edited four collections of essays, and has over a dozen essays published. Much of her writing is infused with elements of her own life, including hope and healing and honor her Southern roots. Her most recent work is All Night, All Day: Life, Death & Angels.

Michael Amos Cody spent his formative twenties living and working as a songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee, where his songs were recorded by Glen Campbell, Gary Morris, and others, including himself. His new novel, Streets of Nashville, is published by Madville Publishing.

The founder of Madville Publishing, Kimberly (K.P.) Davis is now its director as well as a writer, editor, teacher, and freelance web designer. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and a BA from Columbia College-Chicago in Arts and Entertainment Media Management.

An award-winning freelance writer, Julie Liddell Whitehead covered disasters from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina throughout her career. She writes on mental health, including education and advocacy. Julie’s debut short-story collection, Hurricane Baby: Stories, came out in August 2024 from Madville Publishing.

Julie Cantrell is a mulitple-award winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author known for exploring the many facets of human relationships. While she delves into emotional issues, she does so with a compassionate and open heart, always bringing readers through to a hopeful path for peace, empathy, and healing.

Gabriella Saab is an acclaimed author of historical fiction. Her newest book THE STAR SOCIETY (January 2026) is available now.   Saab’s first two novels, THE LAST CHECKMATE, and DAUGHTERS OF VICTORY, have been published in multiple languages and distributed in multiple countries abroad.

Jodie Cain Smith is the Founder of the Mobile Literary Festival and author of The Woods at Barlow Bend and Bayou Cresting: The Wanting Women of Huet Point. Her upcoming work, Splintered Reeds, is her debut thriller.