2025 SPEAKERS & Panelists
Sean Ennis
Sean Ennis is the author of the story collections Chase Us: Stories (Little A), Cunning, Baffling, Powerful (Thirty West) and Hope and Wild Panic (Malarkey Books). He is a two-time recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Grant, and a graduate of the University of Mississippi MFA program in fiction. He is now the director of a software development bootcamp in Water Valley, MS.
H. Collin Messer
H. Collin Messer is Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of English at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. Prior to joining the leadership team at Covenant in 2022, he taught American literature at Grove City College for 16 years. Messer earned his PhD in American Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill and has published articles and book chapters on William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Raymond Carver, and Walker Percy. He is currently working on a book-length study of Walker Percy, in which he traces Augustinian influences and echoes in Percy’s work with particular interest in the Christian existentialism of both St. Augustine and Percy. He and wife, Elizabeth, have three children, Camille, Grace, and Mac.
Rhonda McDonnell
Rhonda McDonnell, PhD, is a member of the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism at Texas Tech University, where she conducts research on Walker Percy's radical anthropology. She teaches creative writing, American Literature, and composition at Guilford Technical Community College in Greensboro, NC. She might be a transplant to the South, but she calls it her true home.
Karey Lea Perkins
Karey Lea Perkins has taught literature, writing, and philosophy at the university level for over 30 years. An author and editor of several books, essays, and articles, her research interests lie at the intersection of literature and philosophy, with specialties in author and philosopher Walker Percy, contemporary American literature, southern literature, existentialism, semiotic, and ethics. A member of Texas Tech University’s Charles Sanders Peirce Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism, she explores the influence of Peirce in Percy’s writings. As part of the ISP team, she found, co-edited, and published Percy’s original unpublished book, Symbol and Existence: A Study in Meaning (2019). She presently serves as Associate Professor of English at South Carolina State University. For more information, see: https://www.kareyperkins.net/.
Julia Ridley Smith
Julia Ridley Smith is the author of Sex Romp Gone Wrong (Blair, 2024), a short story collection, and The Sum of Trifles (University of Georgia Press, 2021), a memoir about cleaning out her antique-dealer parents’ house, grief, and what the objects we live with mean to us. Smith’s short stories and essays have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Ecotone, the Missouri Review, New England Review, and The Southern Review, among other publications. Her work has been recognized as notable in Best American Essays and supported by the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the United Arts Council of Greater Greensboro, and other arts organizations. She teaches creative writing at UNC Chapel Hill. Find her at juliaridleysmith.com.
Michael Strecker
Michael Strecker is the author of the comedic New Orleans-based novel The Knights of Wade, which has garnered rave reviews from Vanity Fair to The Times-Picayune. His short fiction has been selected twice as a Tennessee Williams Festival finalist and has appeared in leading literary journals. He is also an award-winning stand-up comedian and author of several acclaimed children’s books. He lives in the New Orleans area with his wife and two children.
M. O. Walsh
M.O. Walsh is the author the short story collection The Prospect of Magic and the novels My Sunshine Away and The Big Door Prize. His work has been a New York Times bestseller, won the Pat Conroy Prize for Southern Fiction and was a finalist for the Thurber Award for American Humor. His most recent novel, The Big Door Prize, was recently adapted for television and is currently streaming on Apple TV as a comedy series. Walsh directs the Creative Writing Workshop MFA Program at the University of New Orleans and The Yokshop in Oxford, MS.