Willie Morris Award Winners Plumb the South's Many Realities

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.

Gilmore, of Nashville, Tennessee, also penned the novels "Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen," "The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove" and "The Funeral Dress." She has written for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor.

"Sometimes, the best books transform the ordinary into the extraordinary," said Monica Weatherly, a fiction judge for this year's competition and a former Willie Morris Awards poetry winner. "Susan Gregg Gilmore's 'The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush' does just that.

"Gregg introduces her readers to a small Southern town full of common 'folks' like Leonard, a young boy struggling to make life normal again after his leg is amputated. The events that follow transform not only Leonard, but the people who inhabit this town.

"Gregg is masterful at creating Southern landscapes with a vividness that feels authentic. The characters are written with care, and the narrative doesn't shy away from the complexities of human nature."

Sack is a veteran journalist who has written about national affairs for more than four decades and has shared in three Pulitzer Prizes. He spent 30 years on the staff of The New York Times, where he was a senior writer, and has worked for the Los Angeles Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

He is teaching this spring at Princeton University as a visiting lecturer and Ferris Professor of Journalism. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, he lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

"It's tremendously gratifying to see Mother Emanuel – and the underappreciated story of African Methodism – recognized in this way, particularly at a moment when the full telling of our shared American history is under such assault," he said.

"For anyone who writes from or about the South, there could be no honor more humbling than to be associated with the name and legacy of Willie Morris, a model for us all in his clear-eyed and sensitive portrayals of an ever-evolving region." 

Ralph Eubanks, author and faculty fellow in the university's Center for the Study of Southern Culture, praised the focus of Sacks' account.

"In his book 'Mother Emanuel,' Kevin Sack could have focused on the lowest moment in the history of Charleston's storied African Methodist Episcopal congregation," said Eubanks, one of the competition's nonfiction judges.

"Instead of centering the book solely on tragedy, he takes the reader deep into the church's two centuries of history and its profound role in resistance to racial oppression. In telling Mother Emanuel's story, he engages with the city of Charleston's history and the story of race in the American South as well as the broader Black freedom struggle in the United States."

White is a poet from Georgia who lives and teaches creative writing in New York. His debut poetry collection, "Blue Loop" (University of Georgia Press), was selected for the National Poetry Series by Chelsea Dingman.

"The many overlapping arts of the U.S. South – lyric, narrative, historical, communal – are shaped by strong ironies informed by disparities of access to power and representation: storytelling and silence; praise and negation; prosperity and theft; belonging and, painfully, othering and abjection," White said.

"I praise the Willie Morris Awards for promoting artworks that speak to as many sides of these realities at once as artworks can. This prize will support my endeavors to continue do better by the communal South I have always and will always be part of."

Susan Kinsolving, an award-winning author and poet and a poetry judge for the awards, praised White's imagery.

"AJ White's magnificent poem 'In Arcadia' is haunted by history from antiquity to the recent past, in a continual reckoning with reality and an arcadian dream," she said. "His voice is eloquent and unsparing.

"His earthbound imagery implies a thematic grandeur, the truth of 'a thousand million floodswept tears.'"

Kaleena Stasiak, an Ole Miss assistant professor of art, is producing a letterpress print of White's winning poem. Copies will be available at the March 27 signing session.

The Willie Morris awards are supported by an endowment from Dave and the late Reba Williams, of Connecticut.

Top: Winners of the 2026 Willie Morris Awards for Southern Writing are (from left) Susan Gregg Gilmore, author of ' The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush,' for fiction; Kevin Sack, author of ' Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church,' for nonfiction; and AJ White, author of 'In Arcadia,' for poetry. The winners will be featured in a March 27 session of the Oxford Conference for the Book at Off Square Books in Oxford. Submitted photos