2024 SPEAKERS & Panelists
Jennifer A. Frey
Dr. Jennifer A. Frey is the inaugural dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa, with a secondary appointment as professor of philosophy in the department of philosophy and religion. Her academic research centers around questions of agency and moral psychology, with a special focus on the nature of character of virtue and its relation to accounts of human well-being and flourishing. Dr. Frey frequently writes more popular essays and book reviews in places like Breaking Ground, First Things, Harper’s, Image, The Point, and the Wall Street Journal. She hosts a philosophy, theology, and literature podcast called Sacred and Profane Love.
Brian Giemza
Bryan Giemza is Associate Professor of Humanities and Literature in the Honors College at Texas Tech University. He has written multiple books and articles about Louisiana writers, history, and culture, including Images of Depression-Era Louisiana (2017) and a new edition of The Great Big Doorstep. His books include Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy’s Expanding Worlds (Bloomsbury, June 2023), an edited essay collection on disinformation, and the forthcoming Across the Canyons (2024), and The God of Dark Matter (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025).
Richard Grant
Richard Grant is a magazine journalist and an author of non-fiction books. His last two books, Dispatches From Pluto and The Deepest South of All, were about Mississippi and both were New York Times bestsellers. His previous books include the adventure travel classic God’s Middle Finger and American Nomads, which was made into an acclaimed BBC documentary with Grant as the writer and host.
Currently a regular contributor at Smithsonian magazine, Grant has published journalism in Esquire, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. Originally from London, England, he is now a U.S. citizen. After several years in a remote farmhouse in the Mississippi Delta, an experience chronicled in the multi-award-winning Dispatches From Pluto, Grant is now living in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife and eight-year-old daughter.
Olivia Clare Friedman
Olivia Clare Friedman is the author of three books: the novel Here Lies (Grove Atlantic), a short story collection titled Disasters in the First World (Black Cat/Grove Atlantic), and a book of poems titled The 26-Hour Day (New Issues). Her fourth book, An Arm Fixed to a Wing, a book of poems, is forthcoming from LSU Press in spring 2025. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, among other publications. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. She is an Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing, at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Brannon Costello
Brannon Costello is the James F. Cassidy Professor of English at Louisiana State University, where he teaches and writes about southern studies, comics studies, and the intersections of those fields. He is the author of Neon Visions: The Comics of Howard Chaykin (2017), which was awarded the Comics Studies Society's inaugural Charles Hatfield Prize for Best Scholarly Book, and Plantation Airs: Racial Paternalism and the Transformations of Class in Southern Fiction (2007). His other books include the edited collections Comics and the U.S. South(2012) and Conversations with Michael Chabon (2015), and he contributed a critical afterword to the 2013 reissue of Jack Butler’s lost southern classic Jujitsu for Christ (1986).
M. O. Walsh
M.O. Walsh is the author of the novels The Big Door Prize and My Sunshine Away, which was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Pat Conroy Award for Southern Fiction. His first book, a story collection titled The Prospect of Magic, won the Tartt's First Fiction Prize. His fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Southern Review, Garden and Gun, New York Times and others. His latest novel, The Big Door Prize, has been adapted for television by Emmy winning Writer/Producer David West Read (Schitt's Creek) and is now streaming on Apple TV+. He lives in New Orleans with his wife and family, where he directs the Creative Writing Workshop MFA program at the University of New Orleans.