Ellen Ann Fentress, W. Ralph Eubanks, Paulette Boudreaux, and Kyla Hanington discuss The Academy Stories/Admissions project, led by Ellen Ann Fentress, which publishes first-person accounts from students who took part of--or ran away from--school integration since its 1970 start in the South.
The essays, collected online, are an opportunity for now-adult writers to examine how the school experience formed (or malformed) their racial consciousness. The truth-telling project has been featured in the Washington Post, Slate, Mother Jones, The Hechinger Report, Forbes and The American Conservative.
Fentress is a graduate of Pillow Academy in Greenwood, Mississippi. Ellen Ann Fentress writes about Deep South politics and culture, looking for how big truths pulse in individual life stories. Her essays have 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 also a reporter. Fentress launched The Academy Stories in 2019, an online forum about the impact of the South’s circa 1970 segregation academies on its past and present. Her documentary "Eyes on Mississippi", a 56-minute film on the career of iconic civil-rights journalist Bill Minor, is screened nationally.
Paulette Boudreaux is a Mississippi native who lives in California. Her debut novel, "Mulberry," won the first Lee Smith Novel Prize at Carolina Wren Press, an Independent Publisher Book Award silver medal for Best Southern Fiction, was a finalist for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, and a finalist for Silicon Valley Reads. Her short fiction has appeared in national and international literary journals. She has a BA in journalism from Northeastern University and an MFA from Mills College. She is tenured English faculty at West Valley College and associate faculty in the MFA program at the Mississippi University for Women.
W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of "A Place Like Mississippi," "Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi's Dark Past," and "The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South." He has contributed articles to the Washington Post Outlook and Style sections, WIRED, The Hedgehog Review, The Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, The New Yorker, and National Public Radio. A graduate of the University of Mississippi (B.A.) and the University of Michigan (M.A., English Language and Literature), he is a recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and has been a fellow at the New America Foundation. Ralph lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and three children. From 1995 to 2013 he was director of publishing for the Library of Congress and is the former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia. Currently he is a visiting professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi.
Co-presented with the Prince George's County Human Relations Commission