SHOW DESCRIPTION

Ellen Daniels, executive director of the Mississippi Book Festival and host of MPB Think Radio's It's Lit, Y'all, joins Soul Sessions ahead of the festival's twelfth year on the Mississippi State Capitol grounds. Daniels talks about what changes when she trades running forty-eight simultaneous panels for hosting a single weekly radio interview, and how a teacher's email in 2023 grew into the festival's now-beloved children's workshop room. She previews the star-studded 2026 lineup — George Saunders, Deesha Philyaw, Kate McKinnon, Rick Ross, and Andrew McCarthy among them — and explains why this year's festival moved off its usual date. Daniels also walks through the full weekend surrounding the September 26th festival, from the Frank-in-Stein's Beer Garden to the Hot Fest Cooldown at Hal & Mal's. She closes with a memory from the festival's first post-COVID return in 2022, and what keeps her coming back to Book Festival Day year after year.

TRANSCRIPT

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INTRO

Paul

She spends most Monday afternoons on the other side of the microphone, asking Mississippi's writers the questions. This September, the questions go the other way. Hey, it's Paul Wolf with the front row seat to conversations on culture from Jackson, Mississippi. We call our podcast Soul Sessions. It's the people, places, and events that make the City With Soul shine. On today's show, Ellen Daniels is the executive director of the Mississippi Book Festival and the host of MPB Think Radio's It's Lit, Y'all. Ellen joins us ahead of the Book Festival's twelfth year on the State Capitol grounds, where authors like George Saunders, Deesha Philyaw, and Rick Ross will pack Jackson's biggest literary weekend.

Paul

Welcome, Ellen Daniels, to Soul Sessions.

Ellen

Thank you, Paul. So glad to be here with you again. It's been a couple of years.

Paul

It has. You know, I'm trying to give some of your other staff a chance to talk about this incredible, incredible festival. But I don't know — this year we had to get you back on. So I'm glad you're here.

Ellen

Well, I appreciate you spreading the love, but I'm glad that I warranted another invitation.

How Ellen Daniels Started Hosting MPB's It's Lit, Y'all

Paul

Well, you know, you're so busy these days with getting this festival ready. I mean, as we record this, we're at the beginning of the month of September. But you also, in addition to being the festival director, you are a podcast host yourself. Your own show, It's Lit, Y'all, is on MPB. I want to know how that came about, and what changes for you when you're leading a single conversation instead of building an entire day out of conversations.

Ellen

So, you know, MPB reached out to me probably about December of last year, and with things that were going on with national funding for statewide public information stations and radio stations, like our —

Paul

Yes.

Ellen

— each state's PBS. There were lots of budget cuts, so they were revamping a lot of their programming — a lot of local interest stuff, because they weren't tapping into so much of the NPR stuff anymore. And —

Paul

That's right.

Ellen

— they just asked me, "Hey, what do you think about having a radio show talking about books?" And I was like, "Well, I don't really know anything about how to do that." And Java Chapman, the director of radio at MPB, asked me a question right before the Frankenstein movie came out — "So what do you think about the Frankenstein movie?" And I just went on this whole diatribe about Gothic literature — Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was one of the only books I was required to read in high school that I actually liked — and just went on and on. And he just said, "You see there, you just did it." And I was like, "You jerk."

Paul

That's the show.

Ellen

So I was like, sure, let's give it a whirl. And this is actually a funny story — we thought it was going to start in spring. A couple of days after Christmas, Java called me and said, "Hey, Ellen, so I made a mistake on the start date — it doesn't start in the spring, it actually starts at the beginning of January." And I was like, my gosh. I hadn't even really thought about programming yet — I've got a young family, small children, and Christmas is such a crazy time. So I'll be honest, it airs live at three p.m. on the MPB station, and every Monday morning I'm fighting for my life figuring out what I'm going to talk about.

Paul

No pressure.

Ellen

But I've had the best time doing it. My dear friends Tondra Murphy, who I work with — she's the community engagement director for the festival — and Tasha Kaiser, the Mississippi Mom Reads on Instagram, come on once a month and we just have our gab sesh about all things book. And I've had some authors on too, like Beth Ann Fennelly and Kelly Foster Lundquist — just an assortment of people. It's a lot of fun. I love everybody at MPB.

Paul

That's a great group over there, and it's a great show — Monday afternoons on MPB, It's Lit, Y'all. You sit in that host chair. Is there something you find yourself chasing — a moment you're looking for, something you didn't notice before — and when you hear it, you think, "Yes, this is why I do this"?

Ellen

Honestly, what I'm chasing is how I feel while I'm doing it. I'll admit, I'm very stressed out about the program all day before I get to MPB, and then I sit down in that chair and I kind of zen out. They have these really harsh fluorescent lights, but then these spotlights — so I go turn the fluorescent lights off. I'm like, we're not operating in here, I want some —

Paul

Ha ha ha.

Ellen

— low light. It's very cozy, the chair is really comfortable, and it's just so much fun. The festival can accommodate up to forty-eight panel discussions and conversations throughout the day, and sometimes I feel like a puppet master — that makes me sound like I've got too much control, but something akin to that — grouping these people together to do these things. But then I'm not part of any of them. I've got a funny story about somebody who met me for the first time and told me how much they loved the book festival and these panels. I said, yeah, I really dream about going to a panel at the book festival one day. And the person goes —

Paul

Ha ha ha ha.

Ellen

"Oh my gosh, I am so sorry — I've thought you were somebody else this whole time." And I said, well, I am who you think I am, but I've never —

Paul

Yeah.

Ellen

I've never actually gotten to sit through an entire panel at the book festival. So it's kind of like I get to do the thing I'm always envious of — everybody who comes to the festival gets to view these conversations, and be part of the conversation.

Paul

I see you running around the festival grounds every year — from here to there — but you don't really get to enjoy your own party, do you?

Ellen

Yeah, the joke is that if you're having fun on festival day, you're not doing your job.

What's Changed Since Ellen Daniels Became Mississippi Book Festival's Executive Director in 2021

Paul

You became executive director in 2021. What's the biggest way the festival looks different now than when you took it over?

Ellen

I was set up very nicely coming into this role, because Holly Lange had done the hard work of forming it and giving it an identity. We've had so much fun inheriting that model and just adding to it. We have a children's workshop room now — that started in 2023, the first time we did it. That happened because my friend Jamie Dixon, a high school English teacher in Madison who's also a poet, went to the Bennington Writing Seminars — which, for any literary heads listening, is a really big deal. He emailed me one year and said, you have writing workshops all throughout the day in the Capitol — could I lead a poetry writing workshop for young people? I said, that sounds like a great idea. And that room was packed. It showed us what a desire there was for that, so we built out the children's workshop room in 2024, for the 10th-anniversary festival, and it was a huge success.

There are so many writing workshops happening now, and that's something I've taken a particular interest in, because attending writing workshops can be costly. We've really beefed up our writing workshops over the years, and you get to do them free of charge — not just for adults, we have kids' writing workshops too. That's another thing I'm always jealous of the festival audience for — they get to learn at the feet of really great instructors and writers.

And just to mention — we're doing something completely different this year that we've never done before. There's a Mississippi author named Jennifer Gordon who's written a memoir called Stay, about reconciling with your past, finding home in your own body, and finding your center. She practices yoga, and she's going to lead a yoga workshop on the Capitol lawn starting at nine in the morning on Book Festival Day, going until ten. We've never done that before.

The book festival used to be one weekend a year, and now we have programming all throughout the year. We have our student programming, called Turn the Page — it runs the entire school year, and Dr. Tondra Murphy leads that up. She goes into schools all around the state taking authors into classrooms — authors present their book, then lead a creative enrichment activity with the students centered around it. And then we have what we call Reading the Room — it's like a silent book club, where everybody —

Paul

Yeah.

Ellen

— meets in a room and reads silently for thirty minutes, then talks to the person next to them for fifteen minutes about what they're reading, then reads again. We do that with the Mississippi Humanities Council.

And then, Paul, we send out a lot of invitations to authors for the festival — probably about 500 a year. What you see on festival day is who's said yes. We usually end up with around 180 authors, so that's a lot of no's. We get a lot of no's for various —

Paul

Sure.

Ellen

— reasons. But sometimes, if an author can't come, their publicist or agent will say, I'd love to come do something off-season if y'all ever do anything. So we do that — we have off-season programming with authors. For instance, Visit Jackson — y'all helped us bring Tabitha Brown to Jackson, which was such a huge —

Paul

Yes. Phenomenal.

Ellen

— thing. That was amazing. We wanted it to be a big community event, so it was Visit Jackson, the Mississippi Book Festival, Lemuria Books, and JSU — all these different institutions and organizations coming together to do a really great book event for the city of Jackson. It was fun — people came from all over the state to see Tabitha Brown.

Paul

Yes, they did. They filled the Jackson Convention Complex, and we had the Sonic Boom of the South march in and play for her. It was her birthday, if I remember correctly — she was so moved.

Ellen

She cried. She was so moved. And I feel like, if we could have afforded it, we could have filled up the Coliseum, because —

Paul

I think so.

Ellen

— every time, we did two rounds of tickets and they sold out almost immediately, both times.

Paul

Boy, that was a crazy 48 to 72 hours, just watching those tickets fly and saying, well, we've got to sell more, we've got to open up more space.

Ellen

Yeah.

Building the 2026 Mississippi Book Festival Lineup: George Saunders, Deesha Philyaw, Kate McKinnon, and More

Paul

Here's the problem I think you're going to have at this year's festival, because the names this year are huge — how are we going to get everybody into Galloway, or into the fellowship hall, with George Saunders and Deesha Philyaw and Kate McKinnon and Rick Ross and Andrew McCarthy? What a range. Tell me what it's like building a day that can hold all of that.

Ellen

Every year presents its own challenges. This year we're not on our normal day — it's September 26th. It's usually the second Saturday in September, but this year one of our board members told us, maybe around December of 2025, hey, just so you know, the date of the festival is the first night of Rosh Hashanah this year. We were —

Paul

Yeah.

Ellen

— like, oh — and Jewish holidays are set by the lunar calendar. So we talked to some people, took a board vote, and voted to move it to the fourth Saturday in September, just for this one year. Next year we'll be back on our normal day — September 11th, 2027. So we're September 26th this year, and there are a lot of book events going on around the country that weekend — I believe we're at seven that weekend.

Paul

Wow.

Ellen

Yeah. And that's why we normally pick the second Saturday in September — we're not really up against anything else. It's not surface-of-the-sun hot yet, and we haven't gotten into those really critical SEC or SWAC games. But this year we had to roll the dice, and luckily it worked out as far as football goes. But we've got the Delaware Book Festival, which — full transparency — I'd never heard of until this year, and the lineup looks awesome. There's the Chicago Humanities Festival. The Brooklyn Book Festival is the Sunday, the day after ours, so a lot of authors coming for the Mississippi Book Festival were flying out of Jackson straight to New York. There's a lot of demand for authors all over the country — there's the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, and there's also the biennial American Book Festival in Paris. And look — I think Mississippi is —

Paul

My gosh.

Ellen

— awesome, but we are not a paid week in Paris for authors.

Paul

This is true.

Ellen

And a lot of our book festival friends — a lot of Mississippi authors — are going to be in Paris for that festival. And look, I know they'll represent us so well, and I'm proud of them. The biennial American Book Festival in Paris flies authors in a week early so they can acclimate to jet lag — and I'm just like, wow, that's an incredible opportunity, I don't blame y'all. But it has been a little bit of an issue for us, getting authors. So the fact that we've lined up this star power this year, against all odds, feels pretty amazing. We have six major, high-priority sessions in Galloway Sanctuary on festival day, and then amazing authors scattered throughout. Not everybody who wants to attend some of these sessions is going to get in, because it's first-come, first-served. I mean, that is —

Paul

Right.

Ellen

— there's no registration, you don't pay to get in, it's totally free, and it's truly first-come, first-served. 750 people can fit in Galloway Sanctuary, 400 in Galloway Fellowship, 300 in Galloway Reception — and that's the cutoff, otherwise we're in violation of the fire marshal, and we do not want to make that guy mad. So we have —

Paul

This is true.

Ellen

— to — I mean, there are going to be some hard conversations on Book Festival Day. But then there's the signing lines — we've had to develop a whole signing-line protocol for the six really high-priority signing lines. The festival audience will get an email about the signing-line etiquette for those six lines —

Paul

Ha ha ha.

Ellen

Yeah — no posed photos, three-book maximum, no coming behind the table. You can take all the selfies you want, but you can only have three books, because it's not fair to everybody else in line for you to walk up with ten books wanting them personalized. There's no personalizing — you can get a signature. It's going to be wild, it's going to be amazing. I don't get to stay for a whole panel — I like to see the excitement of the crowd, and then I go run do something else.

What's Happening in Jackson During Mississippi Book Festival Weekend 2026

Paul

So the festival lands on the Capitol grounds and at Galloway Church again this year. We said the date is September 26th, but there's so much else going on that weekend and leading up to the festival. Can you give me a snapshot — hit the highlights of what all we've got happening in town that weekend?

Ellen

I love Book Festival week — it's filled with so many things. We've always got lots of stuff surrounding the festival. After the festival, once the day's been so great and it's not 4,000 degrees outside anymore, hopefully, prayerfully —

Paul

Ha ha.

Ellen

— people aren't too exhausted to do more. So right beside the festival grounds in Smith Park, Downtown Jackson Partners is doing something so fun — the Frank-in-Stein's Beer Garden, with Frank the Camel. If everybody knows about Hump Day Wednesdays in Smith Park, they always have Frank the Camel there — so there'll be beer, community, and music from five to seven. As soon as you're done with your last session and getting your book signed, you can walk over to Smith Park, enjoy music, get pictures with Frank, have a beer. Downtown Jackson Partners has done such great things with Smith Park — it looks fantastic.

And then, to really cap off Book Festival weekend, there's the Hot Fest Cooldown at Hal & Mal's, put on by Frascogna Law Group. They've got great Jackson musical talent there — of course there's Hal & Mal's food, you've got to get some comeback sauce. It's free and open to everyone to enjoy the show, though you do have to pay for your food. Last year I was dead on my feet, but I went to the after-party anyway to see everybody, and when I walked in there were like eight hundred people in that —

Paul

Yeah.

Ellen

— room at Hal & Mal's. I had my seventh adrenaline rush and had the time of my life dancing. And there's the restaurants all around Jackson on Friday, with all the authors and donors coming into town — they get to enjoy the wonderful cuisine we have around Jackson. I can't wait for everyone to get here and enjoy the weekend.

We have our KidNote on Friday at Thalia Mara Hall, with area public school kids seeing Kate McKinnon on Friday morning — that's live-streamed all over the state into classrooms, and I believe we reached 24,000 kids last year. All the students who come in person will leave with their own copy of the book, and we send copies to the virtually participating school libraries. So there's a lot to do — and I'm sure I'm forgetting something, Paul. What do you know about?

Paul

Well, we're going to put links in our show notes to all the events surrounding Book Festival weekend, but I do know there's a Late Night with Rita Brent live taping —

Ellen

Yes.

Paul

— that's book-festival themed. And the sixtieth-anniversary celebration of Margaret Walker Alexander's Jubilee at Jackson State University. So there's really something for everybody.

Ellen

Yes, on Thursday. Some of the festival authors are going to be at the Margaret Walker Center — Randal Maurice Jelks is going to be on a panel in the old Supreme Courtroom, which will be broadcast on C-SPAN later on. And Maryemma Graham, who's been to the book festival before with her biography of Margaret Walker, will be at that celebration too.

Paul

Looking at the schedule for the weekend, Ellen — the panels, the workshops, the family-friendly activities, the food vendors, the author signings, Authors Alley — I think you're trying to put us all in an early grave.

Ellen

Well, I hope not. You know, the schedule just —

Paul

Ha ha ha.

Ellen

— went out on September 1st. I just encourage everyone to plan your day. A common complaint is that there are too many things people want to see and not enough hours in the day. But luckily, all of the sessions are recorded, so you'll be able to watch the ones you missed at a later date — I'm really grateful for that. However, the exuberance and fun on the Capitol lawn — that's a one-day thing. You can only get that here.

Why the Mississippi Book Festival Feels Like Home, According to Ellen Daniels

Paul

This is just an amazing weekend for anyone — and I'll say, even if you're not a reader, this is a weekend of culture in Jackson, Mississippi. Ellen, for someone who's never been to the festival, what's the feeling you want them to take away from the weekend?

Ellen

Huh. Well, that's — just that people of differing circumstances and opinions can still all come together over a shared love of something. And on Book Festival Day, it's the love of books and reading and authors, and most importantly, community. That's really what fuels me personally — that's what keeps me going on Book Festival Day, because I'm operating on very little sleep, trekking back and forth between Galloway and the Capitol, just soaking up that feeling and that joy of all different kinds of people. I'm just addicted to it — I'm a sucker for it, I can't get enough of it.

2022 was the first year we came back after COVID, and things had been so fraught in our country. I will never forget cutting that line up between the Capitol and Galloway and having to stop every few steps just to stand in the middle of the festival site and soak that all in, because I had forgotten how that felt, and that it was still possible. And just everybody being the very best versions of themselves — Mississippi being the best version of itself — showing the people who've come from all over the country to this festival the Mississippi that I know and love. That makes me very proud that we're able to do that on Book Festival Day.

Paul

That is Ellen Daniels, executive director of the Mississippi Book Festival and host of MPB's It's Lit, Y'all, whose story is about what happens when a whole city shows up for something bigger than itself. Ellen told me about standing on the festival site in 2022, the first year back after COVID, and having to stop every few steps just to take in the sight of people coming back together — proof, she said, that this kind of gathering was still possible. She's also spent the past five years building onto what Holly Lange started, including a children's workshop room that began with one teacher's email asking if he could lead a poetry session for kids.

This year's festival lands on the Capitol grounds and at Galloway Church on September 26th, with George Saunders, Deesha Philyaw, Kate McKinnon, and Rick Ross among the names filling the day — and Ellen's own show, It's Lit, Y'all, airs live Monday afternoons on MPB. We'll have links in our show notes to the full festival weekend, including the Frank-in-Stein's Beer Garden at Smith Park and the Hot Fest Cooldown at Hal & Mal's, at visitjackson.com/soulsessions.

Soul Sessions comes to you from Visit Jackson, the destination organization for Jackson, Mississippi — the City With Soul. Our executive producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Rickey Thigpen, and I'm Paul Wolf, managing editor and your host for these conversations. Everything Jackson — events, stories, places to go — lives at visitjackson.com. Got a story idea or a question about the City With Soul? We want to hear it — reach us at pwolf@visitjackson.com.

Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you again soon.

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