Written from the point of view of the assassin, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” reveals in chilling detail the mind of the murderer. This compelling exhibit includes pages from Welty’s original manuscript draft, the July 1963 issue of The New Yorker in which the story was published, photographs of the crime scene, and other related artifacts.

A companion display focuses on the relationship between Millsaps and Tougaloo colleges preceding and during the civil rights movement and Welty’s association with both institutions, one historically white and the other historically black. The exhibit runs through December 15. For more information or to reserve a tour, call 601-353-7762.

Be sure also to visit “This Is Home: Medgar Evers, Mississippi, and the Movement,” an exhibit at the William F. Winter Archives and History Building in Jackson, now open through October 31 and then touring the state. These and other exhibitions and events recognize the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Medgar Wiley Evers, Mississippi NAACP field secretary and civil rights visionary. For more information, visit eversinstitute.org.

Lumumba will use the $2,000 fellowship to cover travel, housing, and other expenses incurred while doing primary research in the Eudora Welty Collection at the William F. Winter Archives and History Building to explore the inclusion of elements of the African American community in Welty’s fiction and photographs. She plans to spend two months this summer in the archives, reviewing images, personal letters and notes, and published works, in preparation for her dissertation on mothering and foodways of disenfranchised communities in texts of the Global South.

The Welty photographs are shown through the courtesy of Eudora Welty LLC — Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

National winners included Merrilee Bufkin, Mississippi School for the Arts, Gold Medal, poetry, who was also chosen for an American Voices honor and read from her work at the ceremony. She is shown here with her family.

Other national winners were Katelyn Davis, Mississippi School for the Arts, Gold Medal, humor; Grace Gibson, St. Andrew’s Episcopal, Gold Medal, flash fiction; and Rachel Jones, Mississippi School for Math and Science, Silver Medal, personal essay/memoir.

Bridget Edwards, Welty House director, and Jeanne Luckett, Welty Foundation Communications Coordinator, presented the awards. All national winners will be recognized at a ceremony in New York in May.

Bufkin was also chosen for an American Voices honor, and four others from the Welty Foundation affiliate entries were named American Voices nominees. They include Jess Bennett, Clinton High School, short story; Lauren Ladner, Ocean Springs Middle School, short story; Joseph Messer, Mississippi School for Math and Science, personal essay; and Lee Schmidt, St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, short story.

Another 108 awards — including 30 Gold Keys, 28 Silver Keys, and 50 Honorable Mentions — were presented at the awards ceremony. Download the complete list of winners here.

The Mississippi regional competition is held in 20 counties. There were 346 entries from some 264 schools and home-schoolers. The Eudora Welty Foundation serves as the Mississippi affiliate and works in partnership with the Eudora Welty House, which administers the competition with the support of a generous grant from the C Spire Foundation.

Teachers will come to Jackson to participate in “One Place, One Time: Jackson, Mississippi, 1963.” The workshop, to be held in two sessions July 14-19 and July 21-26, will focus on Jackson in 1963 and will coincide with the 50^th anniversary of the murder of Medgar Evers, a native Mississippian and NAACP field secretary.

According to project co-director, Dr. Stephanie Rolph, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Millsaps College, where the workshops will be held, participants will discover “new ways of understanding the complex intersections of race and power, cultural change and resistance, institutions and individuals, and will further provide us with ways of making these intersections vivid for our students.”

Civil rights veterans participating will be Myrlie Evers and former Tougaloo College Chaplain Ed King. Civil rights historians will include Dr. Michael Williams, author of Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr; Dr. Leslie McLemore, founder of the Fannie Lou Hamer Institute on Citizenship and Democracy, and Dr. Robert Luckett, director of the Margaret Walker Center, Jackson State University. Jerry Mitchell, award-winning journalist who helped bring about justice in the Evers case because of his relentless reporting, will also be on the faculty.

Among the materials that participants will study are the papers of Medgar Evers, Eudora Welty, and the Sovereignty Commission files at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and the papers of Margaret Walker Alexander at Jackson State University. They will visit local historic sites connected with the Jackson civil rights movement as well as museums  featuring Evers exhibits.

Dr. Suzanne Marrs, co-director of the project will lead the participants in discussions of Welty and tours of the Welty House, which offer profound insight into the creative process of this major American writer and provide a sense of Welty’s personality and values, the values that prompted her to call for integration and to write so powerfully about the tragedy of Evers’s death in “Where Is the Voice Coming From.”

The Welty Garden and book continue to be featured in national media with a notice on the Martha Stewart Living blog recounting the story of Chestina Welty’s sending her daughter, Eudora, camellias from the garden to brighten up the cold winter days in New York. Read the full story here with its modern day sequel made possible by Susan Haltom, Welty Garden consultant.

Melissa Ozawa, author of the blog article, also has a feature about writers and their gardens in the April 2013 issue of Martha Stewart Living. Eudora and the Welty Garden are prominently included as the lead—wonderful promotion for the Garden and Haltom’s book with Jane Roy Brown, One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place.

Participants include, seated from left, Alec Valentine of Clinton, Dr. Phyllis Hollenbeck of Jackson, Dr. John Bower of Brandon, Ann Bittick of Jackson, and Alfreda Spell of Jackson. Standing from left, Rev. Martha Blount of Jackson, Jeanne Luckett of Jackson, Marsha Cannon of Jackson, Dr. Bridget Edwards of Jackson, Katrina Byrd of Jackson, Dr. Suzanne Marrs of Jackson, Dr. Virginia Lee Cora of Jackson, Anna Marie Barnes of Jackson, and Dr. Nola Gibson of Madison.  Not pictured are Sallie Fordice of Vicksburg and Laura Magee of Jackson.

The Cereus Readers Books Club was created in honor of Welty and her friends who gathered for the annual blooming of the night-blooming cereus flower. Lemuria has also posted a Knowing Miss Welty blog with stories from people who knew Welty herself as well as those who admire her work. The bookstore has highlighted Welty in a promotion campaign entitled Miss Welty’s REAL Bookstore with posters and bookmarks.

The Jackson performance will be at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 26, at Millsaps in the Recital Hall of the Gertrude C. Ford Academic Complex. The Meridian event will be hosted by Mississippi State University Meridian Campus in Kahlmus Auditorium at 7 p.m. on the 27th. The Alcorn State University presentation will be in the Fine Arts Building Little Theater at 11:30 a.m. on the 28th. All programs are free and open to the public.

“Why I Live at the P. O.” is the story of the postmistress of China Grove, Mississippi, and her relationships with the quirky members of her small-town family. “A Worn Path” traces elderly Phoenix Jackson’s precarious journey through the woods to Natchez to obtain medicine for her sick grandson. “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” is the chilling story Welty wrote the day that Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered, told from the point of view of the assassin.

Walsh studied acting at Yale, performed in Los Angeles on stage, television, and film, then became a lawyer for abused children. Since returning to acting in 2006, she has appeared in Bay Area venues and internationally and is a drama lecturer in continuing studies at Stanford. She is also the granddaughter of Aimeé Shands Walsh, one of Welty’s childhood friends from Jackson who attended Columbia University with her in 1930. Walsh spent summers with her grandmother and visited Welty often.

Schiller is a Ph.D. candidate in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford, having studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Cape Town, South Africa, for her B.A. and New York University for her M.A. She has worked on stage in San Diego and appeared as a principal dancer with the National Dance Company of Ghana.

Rehm is Artistic Director of Stanford Summer Theater and has directed and acted in many productions, including The Wanderings of Odysseus, which played in Athens, Greece. Rush also has worked as an actor or director nationwide and is the author of several books on Greek tragedy, he is Professor of Drama and Classics at Stanford.