Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters announces 2024 award winners

TUPELO — The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters (MIAL) announced the recipients of its 45th annual awards across a variety of categories.

The annual MIAL awards weekend will be held on June 7 and 8 in Jackson, beginning with a reception at Fischer Galleries.

On Saturday, at 1 p.m. at Lemuria Books in Banner Hall, honorees Charles Reagan Wilson, A.H. Jerriod Avant, Lee Durkee, Kate Medley and Curtis Wilkie will read from their award-winning works. It will be followed by a Gala in the Grand Hall at the Mississippi Museum of Art at 6:30 p.m. where all winners will be honored and presented with their prizes.

Tickets for the event, and a full list of winners, are available at ms-arts-letters.org.

Northeast Mississippi MIAL winners:

Nonfiction: Charles Reagan Wilson — "The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South"

Charles Reagan Wilson grew up in the west Texas town of El Paso, but his family roots are in Tennessee. He earned degrees from the University of Texas at El Paso and his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. He is professor emeritus of history and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, where he taught from 1981 until 2014.

Wilson is the author of "Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920;" "Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis;" "Flashes of Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South;" and "The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South." He is coeditor, with William Ferris, of the original "Encyclopedia of Southern Culture;" general editor of the twenty-four-volume "New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture;" and contributor to the "Mississippi Encyclopedia."

Life Writing: Lee Durkee — "Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint"

Educated in Mississippi at W. I. Thames, Lillie Burney, Rowan, Hattiesburg High, Pearl River Junior College, and the University of Southern Mississippi, Lee Durkee is the author of the novels "Rides of the Midway" and "The Last Taxi Driver," named a Book of the Year in the U.S., France, and Ireland.

His memoir, "Stalking Shakespeare," is described as “wickedly entertaining” by The New York Times and as “gripping, poignant, and enjoyable . . . his words thrill and beguile” by The Washington Post. Durkee’s stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Sun, Tin House, Zoetrope, Garden & Gun, The Oxford American, New England Review, and Mississippi Noir. Durkee lives in Taylor, Mississippi.

Poetry: A. H. Jerriod Avant, Muscadine

A. H. Jerriod Avant was born and raised in Longtown, Mississippi. His first book, "Muscadine," was published in September 2023 by Four Way Books. A graduate of Jackson State University, Avant has earned MFA degrees from Spalding University and New York University. A graduate of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, he’s received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program.

A former resident at the James Castle House and Vermont Studio Center, Avant has received two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and an emerging artist grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation. His work has appeared in the Boston Review, Pinwheel, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, Obsidian, The Yale Review, and other journals. Avant’s work has been produced in collaboration with the Emily Harvey Foundation, the Highline NYC, and the Kitchen Lab. Avant earned his PhD in English from the University of Rhode Island in 2023, was then a teaching fellow at Wesleyan University, and will be the 2024–2025 John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi.

NOEL POLK LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: Curtis Wilkie

Curtis Wilkie, a distinguished journalist, author, and professor, was born in Greenville, Mississippi, on September 20, 1940. Wilkie spent his childhood in several towns in the state, including Summit, where he read the New Orleans Times-Picayune and admired the journalism of its Mississippi correspondent, W. F. “Bill” Minor, a reporter who covered the early years of the civil rights movement. Despite growing up in a segregated society, he realized that the South’s customs were unjust. Wilkie’s opinions were confirmed during his last semester as a student at the University of Mississippi. After watching the infamous riot on campus in reaction to the integration by James Meredith in 1962, the 100th anniversary of the South’s defeat at Shiloh, Wilkie wrote his parents expressing his dismay in a ten-page letter illustrated with a map of the conflict.

A few months later, after receiving a degree in journalism Wilkie began his reporting career at the Clarksdale Press Register and his role as a major witness to extraordinary change in the American South. The Mississippi Delta town was a center of the civil rights movement during Wilkie’s tenure from 1963 to 1969, and he covered daily activities of the community and major events like Freedom Summer in 1964, Robert F. Kennedy’s tour of the area in 1967, and an interview with Martin Luther King Jr. two weeks before the civil rights leader was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

Distraught over the violence of the civil right movement and the overall situation in the state, Wilkie decided to leave the South and never return. “Clutching the steering wheel,” he wrote, “I invoked Martin Luther King’s words on the last full night of his life. ‘Free at last! . . . Thank God Almighty, free at last!’” Wilkie went to Washington, D.C., on a congressional fellowship from the American Political Science Association in 1969 and was a reporter and editor for the News-Journal in Wilmington, Delaware, from 1971 to 1975.

He joined the staff of the Boston Globe as a national and foreign correspondent in 1975, covering presidential campaigns and the Middle East, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon through the First Gulf War, including serving several years as Middle East bureau chief. While in Jerusalem, Wilkie saw similarities between the sectarian Israeli-Palestinian conflict and conditions in the segregated South. In 1993, after living outside the South for nearly twenty-five years, he created the Globe’s Southern bureau in New Orleans, reporting on regional and national politics and writing stories about the changing South.

After his retirement from the Boston Globe in 2001, Wilkie joined the journalism faculty at the University of Mississippi and remained until the end of 2020. In 2004, he was named the Kelly G. Cook Chair of Journalism and, in 2007, became the inaugural fellow at the Charles Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics, where he coordinated programs featuring journalists, authors, and political leaders for students, faculty, and the public.

Wilkie is the author of four books — "Dixie: A Personal Odyssey through Events That Shaped the Modern South" (2001); "The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America’s Most Powerful Trial Lawyer" (2010); "Assassins, Eccentrics, Politicians, and Other Persons of Interest: Fifty Pieces from the Road" (2014); and "When Evil Lived in Laurel: The White Knights and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer" (2020) — and coauthor of "Arkansas Mischief: The Birth of a National Scandal with Jim McDougall" (1998); "City Adrift: New Orleans before and after Katrina" with six other journalists (2007); and "The Road to Camelot: Inside JFK’s Five-year Campaign" with Thomas Oliphant (2017).