2025 festival

At Blue Mountain Christian University, April 3-5, 2025

the competition

Eligibility, rules, and how to enter the undergraduate writing competition (deadline: December 6, 2024)

membership benefits

Join us for the 2025 Southern Literary Festival

Keynote Speaker

Please share!

Breakout Session

Listing Our Lives: Using Lists Effectively in Fiction

Presented by Tom Franklin

Friday, April 5
1-2:15 p.m.
Room 321

Tom Franklin

Tom Franklin, from Dickinson, Alabama, is the author of a collection of short stories, Poachers, the title novella of which won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Mystery Story. He's the author of three novels, Hell at the Breech, Smonk and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which was nominated for nine awards and won the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Fiction, the UK'S Gold Dagger Award for Best Novel and the LA Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. It was also an Ole Miss Common Read. In 2013, Franklin co-wrote, with his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly, the novel The Tilted World. Last year he was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame and has recently won the Harper Lee Award from the Alabama Writers Symposium and the Humanities Council Teacher of the Year Award from Ole Miss, where he's taught for over twenty years.