Read Your Way Across Mississippi

Mississippi has produced a large number of writers for many years, both those born locally and those who have moved here. Last week, Amanda and I participated in a poster session at the annual MLA conference. We had been talking about ways to highlight our collection at MLC and were drawn to our large Mississippi section. At MLC, this section consists of authors from Mississippi and books about Mississippi. We wondered if there were as many people writing about our fine state as there were people writing from Mississippi. We did some digging on NoveList, Goodreads, Amazon, Wikipedia, and other sites and came up with a list of fifty books: twenty-five are juvenile and twenty-five are adult, with ten nonfiction books from each of these two categories. While we love and cherish such gems as Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and The Optimist's Daughter (to name only two of countless like books), we wanted to present an up-to-date list featuring Mississippi. Therefore, our selections are from the last ten years.

You can access the Google Document of the lists here.

We also came up with a list of Mississippi authors that you can access here. If you spot someone you think we should add, please let us know in the comments. We hope you enjoy these recommendations. Until next time, happy reading!