John T Edge
Director MS Lab, Founding Director SFA, and Writer in Residence in Writing and Rhetoric
Director of the Mississippi Lab, developer of the Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, I serve the Department of Writing and Rhetoric as writer-in-residence.
Research Interests
Narrative Nonfiction
Biography
John T Edge of Oxford, Mississippi, writes and hosts the television show TrueSouth, which airs on the SEC Network and ESPN and streams via Hulu. He’s at work on a memoir, House of Smoke, set to be published in the fall of 2025. His last book, The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, was named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, and a host of others. Now in paperback, the book was selected by Nashville as a citywide read for 2018. Edge is a contributing editor at Garden & Gun. For 22 years, he served as a columnist for the Oxford American. For three years he wrote the “United Tastes” column for The New York Times. Edge earned an MA in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi and an MA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. Winner of the 2018 nonfiction prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, he was inducted into the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame in 2019. Since 2015, Edge has served the University of Georgia's Grady School of Journalism as a distinguished professor of practice in the low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction. At the University of Mississippi, he serves as writer-in-residence for the Department of Writing and Rhetoric, director of the Mississippi Lab, and developer of the new Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, set on William Faulkner’s onetime mule farm.
Selected: The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South (2017)
House of Smoke: A Memoir from the Deep South (2025)
Courses Taught
- WRIT 399 Reading and Writing Place
Education
B.A. Southern Studies, The University of Mississippi (1996)
M.A. Southern Studies, The University of Mississippi (2002)
MFA Creative Writing, Goucher College (2012)