To write about people, we have to reckon with place.
Nonfiction Mentor
John T Edge writes and hosts the television show TrueSouth, which airs on the SEC Network and ESPN and streams via Hulu. He’s at work on a memoir, House of Smoke, set to be published in the fall of 2025. His last book, The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, was named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, and a host of others. Now in paperback, the book was selected by Nashville as a citywide read for 2018. Edge is a contributing editor at Garden & Gun. For 22 years, he served as a columnist for the Oxford American. For three years he wrote the “United Tastes” column for The New York Times. Winner of the 2018 nonfiction prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, he was inducted into the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame in 2019. At the University of Mississippi, he serves as writer-in-residence for the Department of Writing and Rhetoric and developer of the new Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, set on William Faulkner’s onetime mule farm.