Terre Ware Author Lecture Series

The Terre Ware Author Lecture Series at Arkansas State University-Mountain Home (ASUMH) will welcome acclaimed author Beth Ann Fennelly as the featured speaker on Thursday, October 1, 2026, at 7:00 p.m. in the Vada Sheid Community Development Center. The event is free and open to the public, and books will be available for purchase.

Date: Thursday, October 1, 2026
Time: 7:00 p.m. Lecture
Location: Trout Room, Vada Sheid Community Development Center on the campus of ASUMH

Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021, teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. Beth Ann has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, all with W. W. Norton. She is also the author of 3 books of prose: Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother, a collection of essays; The Tilted World, a novel co-authored with her husband Tom Franklin; and Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (2018)—a celebratory book that combines the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Irish Goodbye, Memoirs & Micro-Memoirs, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in March 2026. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer, and deeply original observer of life’s challenges and joys.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes, “Beth Ann Fennelly’s genre-defying collection is so engaging and readable that you won’t even notice how much you’re learning about confronting the hardest challenge we all share: being human. Wise, irreverent, funny, the pieces—ranging from one sentence to a few pages—condense Fennelly’s life into singularly precise, powerful moments. Collectively, however, they become a living, breathing entity with which you will have many pleasant but deep conversations about your own life.”

Beth Ann has won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Beth Ann’s poetry has been in over fifty anthologies, including Best American Poetry 1996, 2005, and 2006, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Poets of the New Century, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet.

A contributing editor to The Oxford American, she also writes freelance on travel, culture, and design for many magazines. Recent nonfiction awards include the Orlando Award in Nonfiction from A Room of Her Own, the Lamar York Prize from The Chattachoochee Review and the Porter Fleming Award for Excellence in the Essay. She’s the first woman honored with the University of Notre Dame’s Distinguished Alumni in the Arts Award.

Beth Ann lives with her husband and their three children, Anna Claire, Thomas and Nolan, in Oxford, Mississippi.

The first speaker in the new Terre Ware Author Lecture Series at Arkansas State University-Mountain Home (ASUMH) was Rex Nelson, author of Southern Fried: Going Whole Hog in a State of Wonder. The event took place at 6:00 p.m. on October 26, 2021.  

Rex Nelson is the senior editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, where he writes three columns a week along with stories for the newspaper's Sunday Perspective section. Nelson, one of the state's most high-profile writers and speakers, has had a long career in journalism, government and public affairs.

The second speaker in the Terre Ware Author Lecture Series was by Mara Leveritt, author of Devil’s Knot, All Quiet at Mena, and The Boys on the Tracks on March 7, 2023. Leveritt is an American investigative reporter best known for her examinations of official conduct regarding serious crimes in Arkansas. Though often categorized as a “true crime” writer, she says, “I’m more interested in what happens when officials mishandle criminal cases, a sub-genre I’ve dubbed ‘crime after crime’.”

Leveritt’s best known work is Devil’s Knot, about three Arkansas teenagers who were convicted virtually without evidence of having murdered three eight-year-old boys in a crime prosecutors said arose from the teens’ alleged interest in “the occult.” Library Journal called Devil’s Knot “an indictment of a culture and legal system that failed to protect children as defendants or victims.” The New York Times listed the book among 50 “classic” accounts of murder in the United States. A 2013 film based on it starred Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon.

Eli Cranor, nationally-bestselling author of Don’t Know Tough and Ozark Dogs, presented a lecture at Arkansas State University-Mountain Home (ASUMH) on Tuesday, October 3, 2023.  The third speaker in the Terre Ware Author Lecture Series at ASUMH, Cranor lives and writes from the banks of Lake Dardanelle, a reservoir of the Arkansas River nestled in the heart of True Grit country. 

He is an Edgar Award recipient and his debut novel, Don’t Know Tough, won the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest and was named one of the “Best Books of the Year” by USA Today and one of the “Best Crime Novels” of 2022 by the New York Times.  Cranor also pens a weekly column, “Where I’m Writing From,” for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, and his craft column, “Shop Talk,” appears monthly at CrimeReads.  His newest novel, Ozark Dogs, is now available wherever books are sold.