​Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award Nominations

Call for Nominations
 
The Board of Governors of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters invite all members of the organization to nominate works for the 2021 awards. Judges will consider only work shown, published, or performed in 2020. Award categories include Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Music Composition (Classical), Music Composition (Contemporary), Photography, Visual Arts, and Youth Literature. Members may nominate more than one individual in any category and self-nomination is allowed. Nominees should be living Mississippians (current residents or former ones with continuing, significant ties to the state). All nominations are subject to board approval, and nominations must be postmarked on or before January 15, 2021.
 
The nomination form is available here.
Please note a change on the nomination form. Music Composition (Contemporary) should be mailed to:
Sarah Frances Hardy
434 North 14th Street
Oxford, MS 38655
 
The membership form is available at https://www.ms-arts-letters.org/membership.html
 
We encourage all members to honor the artistic achievements of talented friends, family and colleagues, and look forward to receiving nominations.
2020 NOMINATIONS
are listed below. 
Please visit the Winners tab for a list of 2020 award recipients.

Visual Arts

Nominations:​ 
Jason Bouldin, How Can I Keep From Singing? Elegies in Paint
Charlie Buckley, Flooded Delta
Earl Dismuke, 2019 Collection
Jennifer Drinkwater, Faces and Spaces
Kat Fitzpatrick, Not a Still Life
Stacey Johnson, Storytellers
Richard Kelso, Richard Kelso Recent Works
Carlyle Wolfe Lee, Full Bouquet
Laurin McCracken, Watercolors
Gail Morton, Seymour Prater series & others
Marc Poole, Works Created as part of the Natural Museum of the Marine Corps' Combat Art Program
Bill Wilson, The Mississippi Governor's Mansion: Memories of the People's Home

Photography

Nominations:
Nadia Alexis, What Endures
William Eggleston, The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston
Melody Golding, Life Between the Levees: America's Riverboat Pilots
Will Jacks, Po' Monkey's: Portrait of a Juke Joint
Brooke White, Sense of South, Mississippi Burning

Poetry

​Nominations:
Ann Fisher-Wirth, The Bones of Winter Birds
Frank LaRue Owen, The Temple of Warm Harmony
C. T. Salazar, This Might Have Meant Fire
Jordan Sanderson, Dendrology, Swelter

Music Composition (Classical)

Nominations: 
Valentin M. Bogdan, "Vantage Points" for bassoon & violin
Quincy C. Hilliard, Give Me Tomorrow
Steve Rouse, The Bird, the Bee, and the Bear
Steve Rouse, Move
Steve Rouse, Tunnell's Vision
Wadada Leo Smith, Rosa Parks: Pure Love, An Oratorio of Seven Songs

Fiction

Nominations:
John W. Bateman, Who Killed Buster Sparkle?
William Boyle, A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself
Minrose Gwin, The Accidentals
Lisa Howorth, Summerlings: A Novel
Greg Iles, Cemetery Road
R. J. Lee, Grand Slam Murders
Mary Miller, Biloxi
Snowden Wright, American Pop

Nonfiction

Nominations:
William Alsup, Won Over: Reflections of a Federal Judge on His Journey from Jim Crow Mississippi
Lovejoy Boteler, Crooked Snake: The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard
William Dunlap, Pappy Kitchens and the Saga of Red Eye the Rooster
Brooks Eason, Fortunate Son
Shennette Garrett-Scott, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance before the New Deal
John Hailman, Foreign Missions of an American Prosecutor: From Moscow to Morocco and Paris to the Persian Gulf
Shelby Harriel, Behind the Rifle: Women Soldiers in Civil War Mississippi
Margaret McMullan, Where the Angels Lived: One Family’s Story of Exile, Loss, and Return
Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business
​Tammy L. Turner, Dick Waterman: A Life in Blues
Diane Williams, The Life and Legacy of B. B. King: A Mississippi Blues Icon 

Music Composition (Contemporary)

Nominations:
Bark (Tim Lee and Susan Bauer Lee), Terminal Everything
North Mississippi Allstars, Up and Rolling
George Cartwright, dell'umore di chi e sempre in attesa
Christone "Kingfish" Ingram, Kingfish
Molly Thomas, Honey's Fury
Tricia Walker, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter Eye

Youth Literature
​Nominations:
Jimmy Cajoleas, Minor Prophets
Jimmy Cajoleas, The Rambling
Gilbert Ford (Illustrator), Rotten! Vultures, Beetles, Slime, and Nature's Other Decomposers
John Grisham, Theodore Boone: The Accomplice
Angie Thomas, On the Come Up​
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