A series of biographies and memoirs that explore all aspects of contemporary American life and preserve the ineffable in the human experience.
For more information or to submit a proposal, contact associate editor Lisa McMurtray.
Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography
The Nightcrawler King
While growing up in rural Indiana during World War II, William Fagaly began his first venture—collecting and selling earthworms to locals—from which he was christened with a childhood moniker. The ...
The Power of One
For thirty-four years Sister Anne Brooks, a Catholic nun and doctor of osteopathy, served one of the nation’s most impoverished towns and regions, Tutwiler, in Tallahatchie County in the Mississippi ...
In Faulkner's Shadow
What happens when you marry into a family that includes a Nobel Prize winner who is arguably the finest American writer of the twentieth century? Lawrence Wells, author of In Faulkner’s Shadow: A Memoir ...
Stone Motel
In the summers of the early 1970s, Morris Ardoin and his siblings helped run their family's roadside motel in a hot, buggy, bayou town in Cajun Louisiana. The stifling, sticky heat inspired them to find ...
Deep South Dispatch
Former New York Times correspondent John N. Herbers (1923-2017), who covered the civil rights movement for more than a decade, has produced Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist, a ...
Something Inside So Strong
In 1922, Mildred Pitts Walter was born in DeRidder, Louisiana, to a log cutter and a midwife/beautician. She became the first member of her family to go to college, graduating in 1940. Walter moved to ...
Confessions of an Undercover Agent
This true story of an ex-Marine who fought crime as an undercover cop, a narcotics agent, and finally a federal prosecutor spans a decade of crime fighting and narrow escapes. Charlie Spillers dealt with ...
Flight Risk
2018 Next Generation Indie Book Awards
Winner: Memoir (Overcoming Adversity/Tragedy) and Finalist: Regional Non-Fiction
“James Nolan looks back unsparingly on a time few writers have faced with such ...
Freedom Rider Diary
Arrested as a Freedom Rider in June of 1961, Carol Ruth Silver, a twenty-two-year-old recent college graduate originally from Massachusetts, spent the next forty days in Mississippi jail cells, including ...
Delta Rainbow
Betty Bobo Pearson (b. 1922), a seventh-generation, plantation-born Mississippian, defied her cultural heritage—and caused great personal pain for her parents and herself—when she became an activist ...