Angie Thomas, New York Times #1 Best Selling author and a native and resident of Jackson, Mississippi, will offer the keynote address for the McMullan Young Writers Workshop at Millsaps College. The program will be at 7 p.m. on Monday, July 15, and will be in the Recital Hall of the Gertrude C. Ford Academic Complex at Millsaps. It is free and open to the public. Lemuria Books will have Thomas’ books for sale before the lecture at 6:30 p.m. and after the lecture, as well. Thomas will also sign books.
Thomas’ award-winning debut novel, The Hate U Give, received an inaugural Walter Dean Myers grant awarded by We Need Diverse Books and has been made into a major motion picture. Her second novel, On the Come Up, released earlier this year, is about a young female rapper, an experience shared by Thomas when she was a teen. She will be a featured speaker at the 2019 Book Festival August 17.
The McMullan Young Writers Workshop, generously supported by the James and Madeleine McMullan Family Foundation and presented in partnership with Millsaps and the Eudora Welty Foundation, will bring over 70 high school-aged writers from across Mississippi and the region to Millsaps. Students will be in residence at the college for a week and will engage college professors who are also writers and other nationally known authors as they workshop their own writing.
Visiting authors who will do talks about their craft include Katy Simpson Smith, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Kiese Laymon, and Ellen Ann Fentress. Author faculty members include Nadia Alexis, Shalanda Stanley, Richard Boada, Mary Miller, Michael Pickard, and Jamie Dickson. Classes will visit the Welty House and Garden during the week and spend an evening at the Mississippi Museum of Art.
Several of the workshop students were top winners of Scholastic Writing Awards, which entitles them to workshop scholarships. Scholastic is sponsored by the Eudora Welty Foundation and Eudora Welty House and Garden and supported by a generous grant from C Spire Foundation.