Book Signing: Coming Home to Mississippi

Watercolor painting on cover by Wyatt Waters

This Saturday, June 15 from Noon to 1:00 p.m. Charline McCord, Judy H. Tucker, and several contributors will be signing copies of Coming Home to Mississippi at Square Books in Oxford. 

Contributors Cynthia Walker, David Sheffield, Jo McDivitt, Alice Jackson, William Jeanes, Curtis Wilkie, Michael Smith, Mary Donnelly Haskell, Ronnie Riggs, and Wyatt Waters  will all be on hand to sign books. 

Coming Home to Mississippi features essays by prominent Mississippians who examine their lives, their memories of Mississippi, the reasons they left the state, and what drew them back. This latest collaboration from McCord and Tucker, (Growing Up in Mississippi, Christmas Stories from Mississippi) who each contribute their own essay, gathers stories by writers from all corners of the state are as diverse as the regions from which they come. They are of different races, different life experiences, different talents, and different temperaments. Yet in acceding to the magical lure of Mississippi they are in many ways alike.

These vignettes give us a glimpse of the people and places that nurtured the young lives of the essayists and offered the values that directed them as they sought their dreams elsewhere. Often they found that opportunity was within their grasp in their home state and came back to realize their full potential. They came back, in some cases, to retire to a familiar place of pleasant memories, to family and to friends. They all have a love and respect for Mississippi and continue, back home, to use their talents to help make the state an even better place to live. 

Judy Tucker, Wyatt Waters, and Charline
McCord at Lemuria Books last month

Coming Home to Mississippi focuses on the pull of the home state, and considers the changes and the growth in our state.  Essayists talk about how life differs in the disparate parts of our nation and the qualities that make Mississippi unique. 

The book includes essays by Kevin Bullard, Wyatt Cooper, Bob Allan Dunaway, William Dunlap, Morgan Freeman, Carolyn Haines, Barry Hannah, Mary Donnelly Haskell, Sam Haskell, Alice Jackson, William Jeanes, Russell Knight, Johnnie Mae Maberry, Charline R. McCord, Jo McDivitt, Mary Ann Mobley, Willie Morris, Ronnie Riggs, Maureen Ryan, David Sheffield, Michael Farris Smith, Marco St. John, Scott Stricklin, Keith Thibodeaux, J. Dale Thorn, Judy H. Tucker, Cynthia Walker, Tricia Walker, Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Jesmyn Ward, Sela Ward, Norma Watkins, Dolphus Weary, and Curtis Wilkie.

A signed copy of Coming Home to Mississippi would make a great Father's Day gift.