Not long after I started at the Mississippi Humanities Council almost four years ago, I had a meeting with Jere Nash, who spoke about his dream of creating a Mississippi Book Festival. Having been in graduate school at the University of Texas in the 1990s when First Lady Laura Bush helped launch the Texas Book Festival in Austin, I knew how great such an event would be for Mississippi. The Humanities Council quickly signed up as a partner. In addition to our providing annual support, our staff has been actively engaged in the leadership and programming of the festival. Of course, our involvement pales in comparison with that of Nash, Holly Lang, Emily Pote, and the many volunteers who plan and put on Mississippi's literary lawn party. We are proud to be a small part of the team.

The inaugural festival in 2015 was an overwhelming success with virtually every seat in every panel filled. Last year's festival was larger, with more authors and larger spaces to accommodate the incredible public response. On August 19, the Mississippi Book Festival will hold its third annual celebration of books and the authors who write them. You can see a full festival schedule here.

Each year, I get to select which panels the Humanities Council puts its name on as a sponsor. This year, we are excited to help present "A Conversation with the Librarian of Congress," featuring Carla Hayden, the first-ever female and African American head of the Library of Congress, and Congressman Gregg Harper. Congressman Harper, who chairs the Committee on House Administration, which oversees the Library of Congress, is a big supporter of the Library, the book festival, and the humanities. We are also presenting the panel "Write for Mississippi," a project of novelist Katy Simpson Smith, who arranged for Mississippi writers to teach public high school students around the state. An MHC bicentennial grant helped fund the publication of student writings from the program. We are also pleased to present "Capturing Mississippi," a discussion with Mississippi photographers, moderated by former NEH chairman William Ferris and featuring MHC board member Panny Mayfield.

With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities' Special Initiative on the Legacy of Race, we are presenting a Mississippi History panel that features six authors who have written on different aspects of the civil rights movement in Mississippi. If you aren't able to attend this session in person, you can watch it live on C-SPAN, which has broadcast panels from the festival each year. We are also pleased to help present a conversation with the editors of the recently published Mississippi Encyclopedia. This long-gestating project began more than fifteen years ago with a planning grant from the NEH.

Between panels, we invite you to drop by Room 204 of the State Capitol for the Mississippi Marathon Read, a program put together by the MHC and the Mississippi Library Commission with festival writers reading aloud the work of their favorite Mississippi authors throughout the day.

Between panels, we invite you to drop by Room 204 of the State Capitol for the Mississippi Marathon Read, a program put together by the MHC and the Mississippi Library Commission with festival writers reading aloud the work of their favorite Mississippi authors throughout the day. If you have small children, come by Room 103 at 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. to sample our family reading program featuring talented local storytellers.

Since its first year in 2015, the Mississippi Book Festival has become our state's premier literary event, and the MHC is excited and honored to play an active role in it.