2024 McMullan Writers Workshops Faculty Spotlight

The 2024 McMullan Writers Workshops are only one month away! Middle school, high school, and adult writers will gather on the campus of Millsaps College for a fully residential (commuter options available too) week of creative writing June 24-29. Haven’t signed up yet? Space is still available in all three workshop cohorts! Register today at mcmullanwritersworkshops.com.

It’s going to be a great week of creative writing for countless reasons, but one of the biggest is our incredible McMullan writing faculty. Let’s meet them!

High School Workshop

Nadia Alexis

Nadia Alexis is a poet, writer, photographer, and educator born in Harlem, NYC to Haitian immigrants. Her debut full-length collection of poems and photographs, titled Watersheds, will be published by CavanKerry Press in Spring 2025, and was a finalist for the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Prize. Her writing has appeared in Poets & Writers, The Global South, Indiana Review, and Shenandoah, among others. She has also contributed to anthologies like Wild Imperfections: An Anthology of Womanist Poems. Nadia's photography has been published in Forgotten Lands, MQR: Mixtape, The Southern Register, and MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She has received recognition, including an honorable mention in poetry from the 2019 Hurston/Wright College Writers Award, a nomination for the 2020 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters photography award, and a semifinalist position in the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. Nadia is a fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and The Watering Hole, and her photography has been exhibited in the U.S. and Cuba. She holds a PhD in English with a Creative Writing Concentration from the University of Mississippi, where she also earned her MFA in Creative Writing with a focus on Poetry.

Richard Boada

Richard Boada is author of three poetry collections: We Find Each Other in Darkness, The Error of Nostalgia, and Archipelago Sinking. He has been a finalist for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Book Prize and is a recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship. His poems appear in the Southern Poetry Anthology, Urban Voices: 51 Poets / 51 Poems, Crab Orchard Review, Rhino, Third Coast, and the North American Review among others. He teaches for the West Virginia Wesleyan College Low Residency MFA Program and Lane College in Jackson, TN.

Jamie Dickson

Jamie Dickson is the author of Some Sweet Vandal and teaches English and Creative Writing at Germantown High School, just outside of Jackson, MS.  An MFA graduate from the Bennington Writing Seminars, his poems, book reviews, and essays appear in The Common, Ruminate, Hospital Drive, The Louisiana Review, Spillway, Slant, Poetry Quarterly, McSweeney’s, and  Two Hawks Quarterly. He was awarded a poetry fellowship grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission in 2020, and was named Mississippi High School Literary Magazine Advisor of the Year by the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association in 2021. Jamie lives in Jackson with his wife, their son, and a small menagerie of animals.  

Catherine Gray

Catherine Gray is the writer and creator of Unsilenced Woman, a blog where she explores modern motherhood, sexuality, and healing after trauma. Catherine’s writings have captivated audiences globally of up to 2.5 million, and she’s devoted almost a decade to helping writers mine the stories of their lives for self-knowledge and growth. Her writings have been featured by respected organizations for new mothers, such as La Leche League USA, International Cesarean Awareness Network, and ImprovingBirth. She has been a guest on The Birth Hour, the #1 podcast in iTunes Kids & Family, and her essays have been acclaimed by The Bitter Southerner in its Top 10 reader favorites for two consecutive years.  A charismatic speaker, Catherine has delivered two addresses at the Mississippi Women’s March.

Mary Miller

Mary Miller grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of two collections of short stories, Big World (Short Flight/Long Drive Books, 2009), and Always Happy Hour (Liveright, 2017), as well as the novels The Last Days of California (Liveright, 2014) and Biloxi (Liveright, 2019). Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Pushcart Prize XLIV, the Oxford American, New Stories from the South, Norton's Seagull Book of Stories, The Best of McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review, and many others. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction at the University of Texas and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi with her husband, Lucky, and her dog, Winter.

Shalanda Stanley

Shalanda Stanley grew up in Louisiana and earned her BA in creative writing at Florida State University. She has an MEd in special education from the University of Louisiana Monroe and a PhD from LSU in Curriculum and Instruction, with a focus in reading and literacy education. She's an associate professor at the University of Louisiana Monroe. Shalanda’s debut novel, Drowning Is Inevitable, was released in 2015 and is set in and around New Orleans. Her second novel, Nick and June Were Here, published in 2019. She is currently working on her third novel, Last Island, based on the chilling birth and death story of Last Island, Louisiana.

Middle School Workshop

Amelia Plair

Amelia Plair teaches English III and AP Language and Composition at Starkville High School. She holds a master's degree in English literature from Southern Miss and a BA in English and Religious Studies from Millsaps College. She likes baking when she's stressed and dancing in the grocery store aisles when she's not. Amelia keeps four types of chocolate chip in the pantry at all times, and states, “I feel insecure if I have less than two pounds of butter in my refrigerator.” Her hobbies include cruising down the aisle of shame at Aldi, writing a weekly food column for the local newspaper, and embarrassing her three daughters. (That last one is easy because two of them are teenagers.) She loves working with young people and creating connections between ideas. Amelia likes to write and believe it's her best tool for helping someone else understand how she feels. She is excited about writing and growing alongside middle schoolers this summer at her alma mater!

McMullan Writers Retreat (adult writers workshop) 

Ellen Ann Fentress

Ellen Ann Fentress is a Jackson-based writer and teacher. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, The Baffler, Oxford American, Scalawag, storySouth,and New Madrid, as well as on Mississippi public radio, where she was a reporter. Her memoir, The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning tells how one woman reckons with both a region's history and her own past. Through a lens ranging from intimate to the widely human, through moments painful and darkly comic . Her online platform The Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools publishes first-person school stories from the post-integration South, including from breakaway all-white academies. She produced and directed Eyes on Mississippi, a 2016 documentary on iconic civil rights journalist Wilson F. Minor which has screened at universities and institutions across the country.

It’s not too late to join these incredible writers at the McMullan Writers Workshops! We’re so grateful to them for their investment in our writers of all ages and welcome you to be part of the McMullan family, too. Check us out at mcmullanwritersworkshops.com or email myww@millsaps.edu with your questions. In the meantime, watch your inbox for a spotlight on the incredible guest writers who will be joining us June 24-29!