Willie Morris Award Winners Plumb the South’s Many Realities
02/18/26
The Willie Morris Awards are housed at the University of Mississippi and overseen by its Department of Writing and Rhetoric. The awards honor Yazoo City native Morris, former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine, renowned author and a longtime instructor and writer-in-residence at Ole Miss.
“Willie Morris believed in all that was good and possible in the South,” said Susan Gregg Gilmore, winner of this year’s fiction prize. “To be associated with his name in this way, as a writer of Southern stories, is both humbling and a profound honor, especially now when we so desperately need reminders of the good and the hopeful.”
This year’s winners are:
- Fiction – Gilmore, for The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush (Blair)
- Nonfiction – Kevin Sack, author of Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church (Crown Publishing)
- Poetry – AJ White, for In Arcadia.
The winners will be featured March 27 at the Oxford Conference for the Book, organized by the UM Center for the Study of Southern Culture. The session, at 4 p.m. at Off Square Books, will be followed by a book signing and closing reception for the conference.
Read more about the winners here.
