Many congratulations to Keri Leigh Merritt, whose biography An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America , has been named a finalist for the 2026 Willie Morris Award for Southern Nonfiction.
The Willie Morris Awards for Southern Writing honor “honest, optimistic writing about the US South.” The prizes are named for the Mississippi-born writer and former editor of Harper’s Magazine, and are administered by the University of Mississippi’s Department of Writing and Rhetoric. Winners receive a cash prize and the awards’ signature bowling trophy, presented at the Oxford Conference for the Book in Oxford, Mississippi.
An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America by Keri Leigh Merritt is published in the English language by St. Martin’s Press.
Keri Leigh Merritt, Ph.D. is a historian and writer. Her first book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, won both the Bennett Wall Award from the Southern Historical Association as well as the President’s Book Award from the Social Science History Association. She has co-edited several other books, including After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America, and her articles have appeared in outlets from Smithsonian andAeon to The Hill and CNN.