Planning Committee
Beth Ann Fennelly
Poet Laureate of Mississippi, Fennelly teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. She’s a proud affiliate of the Sarah Isom Center. She’s won grants and awards from the N.E.A., the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, and three books of prose: a book of nonfiction, Great with Child; next, The Tilted World, a novel she co-authored with her husband, Tom Franklin; and most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book. Fennelly and Franklin live in Oxford with their three children.
Jaime Harker
Harker is professor of English and the director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi, where she teaches American literature, LGBTQ literature, and gender studies. She has published essays on Japanese translation, popular women writers of the interwar period, Oprah’s book club, William Faulkner, Cold War gay literature, and women’s liberation and gay liberation literature. She is the author of America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars and Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America, and the co-editor of The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club, 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage, This Book Is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics,and Faulkner and Print Culture. Her third monograph, The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon, was released in the fall of 2018 by the University of North Carolina Press.
Theresa Starkey
Starkey is the associate director and an instructional associate professor in gender studies for the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies. Her Ph.D. is in American Studies from Emory University and she was a double major in history and film at Georgia State University. Her writing has appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal, The Oxford American, Mississippi Review, storySouth and elsewhere. She is currently co-editing a collection of essays with Deborah Barker entitled Detecting the South in Fiction, Film and Television. In addition to teaching the Introduction to Gender Studies course, she teaches Gender and Sexuality in Cinema, Gender Studies Methodology, and other courses.
Kate Leland
Leland is a poet from Austin, Texas. She holds an MFA from The University of Mississippi, a BA from Hendrix College and serves as an associate editor with Sibling Rivalry Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, New Limestone Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook "I Wore The Only Garden I've Ever Grown" was published in January 2017 with Headmistress Press.
Kevin Cozart
Cozart joined the Isom Center in July 2007 as a staff assistant. A native Mississippian, he has been a member of the University’s staff since 2004 and has served on the the University’s Staff Council, advisor for the UM Pride Network, president of the Graduate Student Council, and co-director of the ALLIES program. A UM gradate, Kevin holds Master’s degrees in Journalism with an Integrated Marketing Communications emphasis and Higher Education and Student Personnel with a minor in Gender Studies. He has also taught a section of the First Year Experience Class (EDHE 105), Academic Skills for College (EDHE 101 & 303), and Gender Studies classes. He is the winner of the 2019 UM Lift Every Voice Award. His research interests focus on gender and sexuality with regards to mass media and journalism as a gendered organization.
