MSMS students attended the annual Possumtown Bookfest, a community event sparking interest in readers and writers alike, on Aug. 16. The event was organized by MSMS alum Emily Liner, owner of Friendly City Books and founder of the Bookfest.

MSMS senior and English Outreach President Emma Bernard, along with volunteers from across the community, helped set up the tables, chairs and all the books for the event at the Columbus City Arts Council. 

“It’s very nice to see the community come together as a whole to support local authors,” Bernard said. 

Author panels were held in the upstairs theater of the arts council. MSMS junior Aundriya Neely attended the second panel of the day: the Community Read Keynote with author Wright Thompson and moderator John Spann. Neely hasn’t read the book, but through listening to the panel, she said she developed a sense for what it meant.

“I really liked his take on the truth — how he revealed a lot of the information about what really happened,” Neely said.

There were eight total panels covering an array of genres. Three MSMS teachers attended and helped with the event. MSMS English teacher Theo Hummer moderated for the Global Stories Panel, featuring authors Karol Lagodzki, Nana Nkweti and Jianqing Zheng. Hummer said she enjoyed the different perspectives each author brought to the panel, expressing her specific enjoyment of Nana Nkweti’s book of short stories. 

“Her book is this amazing panorama of the different experiences of Cameroonian immigrants to the U.S.,” Hummer said, “which gives the idea that being an immigrant is not one thing.” 

MSMS English teacher Thomas Richardson also assisted in running the event smoothly by directing all the authors to their signings. He said last year — the first time the festival was held — more than 1,000 people attended, and that number was well-exceeded this year. The room the panels were held in could not hold the amount of people that were in attendance.

“It was cool to see the demand for a literary community in this town is real and that people enjoy it and take it seriously,” Richardson said. “There are really only two other large book events in Mississippi that are even on the same scale: the Mississippi Book Festival and the Oxford Literary Festival.” 

MSMS history teacher Chuck Yarborough also attended the festival and saw all the students, authors and people from the community that attended. He said the festival’s outcome was impressive.

“The Possumtown Book Festival is one example of something the students here have access to, which really offers you a chance to enrich yourself culturally and educationally,” Yarborough said. “I was really excited to see so many students participate.”

The Possumtown Bookfest is an event set to carry on for many years and continue to strengthen the community of readers and writers in Columbus, continuing to be a great source of inspiration for all who attend.