The Twelfth Is Coming September 26

On Saturday, September 13, 2025, thousands of literary fans climbed the steps of the State Capitol in Jackson for what has, in eleven years, become one of the most genuinely beloved literary events in the American South. The 2025 Mississippi Book Festival drew contemporary writers from the Magnolia State, the broader region, and the country to more than 50 panel discussions across the State Capitol's stately rooms, nearby Galloway Memorial Methodist Church, and the streets in between. Booksellers Row hummed. The Capitol Rotunda buzzed. Authors Alley filled with self-published voices.

The 2025 festival was the eleventh — the nonprofit launched in 2015 — and it was, in many ways, a quietly remarkable demonstration of what literary culture in Mississippi can be when it's done right.

The 2026 festival is on the calendar for Saturday, September 26, 2026. Mark it.

What 2025 looked like

A few moments worth remembering.

The tribute to Greg Iles. The 2025 festival opened with a tribute to the late Mississippi writer Greg Iles, who passed away earlier in the year. Iles — a Natchez-based author of the Penn Cage series and many other novels — had been a fixture of the Mississippi literary scene for decades. The tribute, organized by current festival executive director Ellen Daniels and former director Holly Lange, was the kind of gathering that demonstrated what the festival has built: a community where Mississippi writers, readers, and the institutions that support them know each other and show up for each other.

The racial healing panel. A panel on the geography of racial healing brought together writer Wright Thompson and La June Montgomery Tabron, president of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, moderated by Vondaris Gordon. Thompson — a Mississippi-rooted Sports Illustrated and New York Times bestselling author whose recent work has interrogated the geography of race and place in America — was in conversation with one of the most influential foundation leaders working on racial justice infrastructure nationally. The panel filled to capacity and ran long, as the best ones tend to do.

Hurricane Katrina at twenty. The 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina anchored a panel that brought together former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, businessman Jim Barksdale, and others to reflect on what the storm did to the Coast and what the recovery did to Mississippi politics. Two decades on, that conversation is no longer raw — but it is far from settled.

The kids' programming. The festival's KidNote events, in 2025, reached nearly 16,000 students across Jackson and the Delta with appearances by Peter Brown and Derrick Barnes — both of whom write specifically for young Black and Brown readers. Pre-festival school-based events extended the reach. By festival staff's count, more than 37,500 booklovers were involved in the seven-day celebration leading up to and through the festival itself.

The Jacktown panel. Eddie Cotton, Jr., Stevie J. Blues, and Arrianna Washington appeared on a panel called "Jacktown USA" focused specifically on the Jackson music scene — a recognition that book festivals work best when they understand the cities that host them as living cultural ecosystems, not just real estate.

The big-name panelists. Tiffany D. Jackson — the bestselling YA novelist now splitting her time between Brooklyn and the South — joined the panelist list. Kiese Laymon, the Jackson native whose memoir Heavy won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, returned. Pulitzer winners and debut authors shared panels and audiences in the way that the best festivals make possible.

What makes it work

Several things, all of them small, all of them earned over a decade of careful programming.

The Capitol setting. Holding a literary festival on the grounds of the State Capitol does something psychologically that holding it at a convention center does not. It says: literature is civic infrastructure. The State Capitol — the seat of governance for a state where book bans, library funding fights, and curriculum battles have been ongoing concerns — is the right setting precisely because it asserts that books and the people who write and read them belong in the rooms where Mississippi makes its decisions.

Free admission. The festival has been free since the beginning. Free is an editorial position. Free means the audiences include people who could not justify paying for entry — students, hourly workers, families, retirees on fixed income. Free is what makes the audience reflect Mississippi rather than only the slice of Mississippi that can afford ticket prices.

The Authors Alley. The decision to host self-published authors alongside official panelists makes the festival genuinely democratic. A writer who has just published a book through Meredith Etc or a similar Mississippi-rooted press can sit at a table next to a New York Times bestseller and have, on any given hour, an equally engaged readership walk past. That hierarchy-flattening matters.

Mississippi Public Broadcasting partnership. The festival's Write On, Mississippi! podcast — now in multiple seasons — extends the reach of every panel discussion into homes statewide. The video archive, captured every year since the first festival, is a public-good resource for educators, researchers, and readers.

The recurring testimonials. Authors who attend the festival keep saying — in interviews, in panel introductions, in their own social media — that it is the warmest book festival they have attended. That word, warm, comes up over and over. That isn't accident. It is the result of staffing decisions, hospitality decisions, programming decisions, and a culture of genuine reader-author respect that the festival has cultivated.

What we'd love to see in 2026

A few things, none of them demands, all of them suggestions.

More Coast representation. The festival is in Jackson. The Coast is in Biloxi, Gulfport, Pascagoula, and points east and west. Coast-rooted writers — and the literary infrastructure of the Coast more generally — could be more visible in the panel programming.

More HBCU faculty visibility. Jackson State, Tougaloo, Alcorn, MVSU, and Rust College have faculty writing serious work right now. The festival programming has gestured toward HBCU representation; deeper integration is possible.

A genre-fiction panel that takes genre fiction seriously. Mississippi has working horror, science fiction, fantasy, and mystery writers who don't always get included in panels framed around literary fiction. A genre panel that treated genre as the demanding craft it is would be welcome.

An ongoing conversation about library funding. Mississippi's library systems have been under sustained financial and political pressure. The festival is, structurally, one of the few statewide events where library advocates, librarians, and the reading public converge. A formal panel or programming track on library funding and intellectual freedom would be both timely and consistent with the festival's civic posture.

Mark the calendar

September 26, 2026, on the State Capitol grounds in Jackson. Thousands of book lovers. Hundreds of authors. Dozens of booksellers. Free. All ages. All over Mississippi.

Show up. Bring a friend. Bring a kid. Buy a book. Stay for the panels. The festival is one of the things this state gets exactly right, and it doesn't need our help to be excellent — it needs our presence to be sustained.

Sources

1. Mississippi Book Festival, official festival site — https://msbookfestival.com/
2. Mississippi Free Press, "Photo Gallery | Mississippi Book Fest 2025," David Rae Morris photographs — https://www.mississippifreepress.org/photo-gallery-mississippi-book-fest-2025/
3. Visit Jackson, "Mississippi Book Festival" event page — https://www.visitjackson.com/events/mississippi-book-festival/
4. Mississippi Book Festival Panelists archive — https://msbookfestival.com/virtual/panelists
5. Writer's Digest, "List of Book Fairs and Book Festivals by State" — https://www.writersdigest.com/publishing-insights/list-of-book-fairs-and-book-festivals-by-state
6. Mississippi Book Festival, About the Festival — https://msbookfestival.com/about/festival