 
Director of the graduate fine arts program in creative writing and writer-in-residence at Ole Miss, Hannah is a highly acclaimed novelist who has written eleven novels and several short story collections, garnering multiple awards and praise from no less a master than Philip Roth, who wrote that Hannah is “the real thing, a writer as true and original as any where.” Hannah is beloved by Oxonians and his students, and has been hugely successful in attracting young writers to the program and others who just want to be in his town. Ann Julian Abadie Originally from Anderson, South Carolina, Abadie is responsible not only for cranking up the Faulkner Conference, now in its thirty-third year, but also for bringing back Mississippi native William Ferris from Yale University in 1978 to be the first director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Abadie has been the center’s associate director and backbone for twenty-nine years, and is the go-to person, the grants person, and an editorial grande dame who scrutinizes with an eagle eye each of the many publications the center produces. In 1992 she fulfilled her dream of restoring the Barnard Observatory, which is the center’s home. Jim Dees More Wolfman Jack than Garrison Keillor, Jim Dees is the host of Thacker Mountain Radio and writer of the column “Lies and Other Truths,” which appears in the Oxford Eagle’s weekly entertainment guide. Dees is a popular fixture in the south end zone at Ole Miss games and at the south end of the City Grocery bar. Whatever the venue, Dees entertains in a signature style of low editorial control and high hilarity. Dean Faulkner Wells Wells’s father, Dean, was William Faulkner’s brother, killed when the small plane he was piloting crashed near Oxford before her birth. She grew up close to her uncle, whom she called Pappy, and wrote a collection of stories, The Ghosts of Rowan Oak, based on the stories he told her. Dean and her husband, Larry, a novelist, have owned the Yoknapatawpha Press since 1979. Herbert Wiley From a venerable Lafayette County family, Wiley inherited Boles’ Shoe Shop, in operation since 1893, from his father, and kept Oxonians well-heeled until 2004, when rising rent prices forced him to close. Wiley reinvented himself as a local R&B icon with his eight-piece band, Mr. Wiley and the Checkmates. His act, in which he sports a silver lamé cape and makes a stage entry à la James Brown, is tremendously popular with Ole Miss students and townspeople who like to dance to the classic covers and original songs. The band recently recorded a CD, Introducing the Checkmates, and a single, “Streak-a-Lean.” Ethel Young-Minor Young-Minor is associate minister of Mt. Hope Missionary Baptist Church, where many members are descendants of the families that founded the church in 1869. Young-Minor is also an associate professor of English and African-American Studies at the University of Mississippi, where she has been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in Southern literature and the Harlem Renaissance for eleven years. |
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