Katy Simpson Smith

About

Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835, and the novels The Story of Land and Sea and Free Men. Her novel The Everlasting is forthcoming in March 2020. She is currently serving as the Eudora Welty Chair for Southern Literature at Millsaps College.

Articles

A STEINWAY RETREAT

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. She’s an 1897 Steinway Model A, with flowerpot legs and a music stand that rises from the keys in a tangle of filigreed wood. When I first...

By Katy Simpson Smith

CAUGHT IN THE CRAZY QUILT

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. Below the quilt is a daybed where I would lie as a child when I was sick or restless, or just wanted my mother’s company as she worked. The...

By Katy Simpson Smith

CHICKEN SHOW SAFARI

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. We compliment his lovely plumage. “Color doesn’t matter,” Laurel says, even though this is the only quality that strikes a newcomer at...

By Katy Simpson Smith

JOURNEY INTO DIRT

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. Looking for souvenirs to take back to your lovers, to prove you thought about them once in the midst of heat, toil, and hardly thinking about...

By Katy Simpson Smith

ON BEING A WRITER FROM JACKSON

In the middle of downtown Jackson stands a triangle of statues carved in rough-hewn stone, their backs to each other, facing out toward the city: William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty. But...

By Katy Simpson Smith

PACKING THE HURRICANE KIT

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. Church steeples still lay on the ground, blue tarps turned homes into extensions of the sea. A human’s arms cannot encompass that loss. We...

By Katy Simpson Smith

TRAVELING NOT FOR TRAVELING’S SAKE

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. Though we already had two hundred miles under our belts, that morning felt like the first real leg, the leg with daylight and sights, with...

By Katy Simpson Smith