Emmy Award-winning TV host to present Lipsey Lecture at Mississippi College

John T. Edge, host of "TrueSouth," will sign copies of his book, "House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home," after delivering the Lipsey Lecture at MC on March 16.

John T. Edge, host of the Emmy Award-winning television program “TrueSouth” and author of “House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home,” will deliver the 49th Sue Price Lipsey Lecture at Mississippi College.

The presentation, sponsored by the Department of English and World Languages at MC, is scheduled for 6 p.m. on Monday, March 16, in the Jean Pittman Williams Recital Hall in the Aven Fine Arts Building on the Clinton campus. A reception will precede the lecture at 5:30 p.m.

Edge will discuss “Writing Home: From Backyard to Broadcast,” a conversation with Anthony Thaxton, co-founder of the Institute for Southern Storytelling at MC, that will include a discussion of “House of Smoke” and the Ocean Springs episode of Edge’s television series. Copies of Edge’s book will be available for sale at the event.

Kristi Melancon, MC professor and department chair of English and philosophy, called Edge the “perfect choice” to deliver this year’s Lipsey Lecture.

“His work combines the personal with the cultural, and demonstrates for students how to use their craft of writing to tell stories and to share culture across diverse media and situations,” Melancon said. “He masterfully puts language to his Southern experience.

“We at MC inhabit a space with both real and imagined particularities that, too, impact who we are and how we live. Learning from Mr. Edge can help us to similarly give words to our lived experiences here so that we can more readily share them with others.”

Recipient of an honorary doctorate from Centenary College, winner of the nonfiction prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, and twice winner of the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, Edge is a fellow in the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame. At the University of Mississippi, he leads the development of the Greenfield Farm Writers Residency and serves as writer-in-residence for the Department of Writing and Rhetoric. He is married to artist Blair Hobbs.

The longest continuous lectureship at MC, the Lipsey Lecture promotes scholarship in the field of humanities to stimulate intellectual curiosity and to allow students a glimpse of the academic world outside of Mississippi College.

The lecture series was established in 1971 as the Mississippi College Humanities Lectureship. In 1974, the lectureship was renamed in honor of Sue Price Lipsey’s 28 years of service as an English professor at MC.

This year's lecture will also serve as the launch event for the merged Department of English and World Languages (formerly the Department of English and Philosophy and the Department of Modern Languages).