Thacker Mountain Radio LIVE in Ocean Springs

The Thacker Mountain Radio Hour returns to the Mississippi Gulf Coast for a very special show at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, MS with two-time National Book Award winner, Jesmyn Ward!

Jesmyn Ward is the author of the novel, Let Us Descend (Scribner’s), now available in paperback.  Let Us Descend describes a journey by an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War. The reader is taken from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.  This journey is as beautifully rendered as it is heart wrenching. NPR called it, “[t]he literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours.”   The book was an Oprah’s Book Club Pick, an instant New York Times bestseller, and winner of the 2024 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction.  Let Us Descend was named one of the best books of 2023 by The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, Time, and The New Yorker.   Ward’s numerous accolades include the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.  She is the historic winner—first woman and first Black American—of two National Book Awards for Fiction - Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011).  Ward is the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award.  Ward is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi. 

Music:

Alex McMurray Band Songwriter, singer and guitarist Alex McMurray has been writing and performing music professionally in New Orleans since 1989.  His albums include his latest, The Recent Future.  His previous albums include, Lucky One and Road Songs.  During the Covid-19 pandemic he hosted the weekly “Fireside Chat” webcast every Tuesday night for over 100 straight weeks under his nom de covid, “Mister Tuesday Night.”  Cable viewers remember his stint on the HBO series, Treme, in which he played himself.  

Ally Durr Ally Durr is a singer songwriter from Jackson, MS. Her latest releases include the singles "What You Livin For" and "Keep Fighting", which is included on the soundtrack of the film, I’m From You.  Durr’s soulful voice reflects her influences of soul, jazz, gospel, hip hop and R&B.  For her Ocean Springs appearance, Ally will be backed by our own Yalobushwhackers.