MERIDIAN, Miss. (Queen City Newsfeed) – The Mississippi Arts + Entertainment Experience (The MAX) will honor acclaimed author Eudora Welty on December 5 with an upscale dinner featuring renowned chef Robert St. John and a screening of the new documentary Eudora.
The event will kick off at 5:30 p.m. with a showing of the 56-minute documentary at the MSU Riley Center historic theater, followed by a panel discussion with the filmmakers. St. John, co-founder of the Institute for Southern Storytelling, is also a celebrated author and culinary figure. He and the institute recently released a richly illustrated book on Welty and debuted the accompanying documentary at the Mississippi Book Festival in September, both of which have received early acclaim.
At 7 p.m., The MAX will host a Welty-inspired dinner in the Structural Steel Hall of Fame rotunda, featuring dishes crafted by St. John. A book signing will follow, with copies of the newly released book available for purchase. Participants in the panel discussion, dinner, and book signing will include St. John, Amy and Anthony Thaxton, and Mary Alice Welty White, niece of Eudora Welty. Tickets for the dinner can be purchased at The MAX or online at www.msarts.org.
“We are excited about this two-part opportunity for encouraging fresh interest in the work of Eudora Welty, a legendary Mississippi creative figure,” said Penny Kemp, The MAX’s president and CEO.
In the Afterword for the book, St. John writes, “Eudora Welty has been a mythical figure most of my life. Like most Mississippi kids, I read her in high school English class. Yet, unlike Hemmingway and Fitzgerald, I knew Welty’s characters and places. They could have been my neighbors and kin.”
Welty, who lived from 1909 to 2001, was a prolific writer of short stories, essays, novels, and memoirs, winning a Pulitzer Prize for her 1973 novel The Optimist’s Daughter. She was also an accomplished photographer, capturing life in Mississippi during the early 1930s for the Works Progress Administration. A Hall of Fame inductee at The MAX in 2017, the Eudora Welty House & Garden in Jackson serves as a National Historic Landmark dedicated to her life and legacy.
According to Anthony Thaxton, co-founder of the storytelling institute, Welty was often private about her personal life, making the documentary and book particularly valuable. “We feature folks who actually had interactions with her, who knew her,” Thaxton said. “We tried to humanize her and show an intimate side of her.”
The book’s lead author is Amy Thaxton, with significant contributions from her husband Anthony and St. John. They collaborated with historian David Crews on the production of the Eudora documentary.
The screening is supported by The Phil Hardin Foundation, which also helped fund the documentary’s production. Proceeds from the ticketed dinner event will benefit education and programming initiatives at The MAX.
