Panel 01 :
Southern Narratives of Resistance
10.18 SATURDAY 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM


Maurice Bailey is the founder, President, and CEO of Save Our Legacy Ourself (SOLO), a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the culture, heritage, and agricultural traditions of the Saltwater Geechee people of Sapelo Island, Georgia. The son of renowned Sapelo Island griot, writer, and activist Cornelia Walker Bailey, Maurice has carried forward his mother’s vision of cultural preservation through agricultural revival since her passing in 2017.

Maurice began this work while serving on the board of the Sapelo Island Cultural and Revitalization Society (SICARS), a nonprofit his mother founded to secure a future for the people of Hog Hammock. In 2014, SICARS launched its agriculture program. By 2016, Maurice, then Vice President of SICARS, partnered with University of Georgia Professor Nik Heynen to co-direct the newly established Cornelia Walker Bailey Program on Land and Agriculture—an incubator supporting this revival.

In 2021, Maurice founded SOLO as a 501(c)(3) to continue and expand this work. SOLO's mission is to preserve cultural traditions while advancing food sovereignty on Sapelo Island. Working with partners, Maurice brought the first major product, Sapelo Island sugarcane, to market in 2020—featured in The New York Times. He is currently leading efforts to incubate and market other heritage crops including Geechee red peas, sour oranges, indigo, and garlic, using agriculture as a tool for cultural survival and economic self-determination.

Katie Burnett is the Associate Director of Transdisciplinary Programs at UTK's Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts. She is the author of Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820-1860 (LSU Press, 2019); co-editor of the essay collection, The Tacky South (LSU Press, 2022); and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Literature of the US South (Routledge, 2022).   Her work has appeared in the Cambridge The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (Cambridge, 2025); the Cambridge Companion to Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction (Cambridge, 2022); the Cambridge History of the Literature of the U.S. South (Cambridge, 2021); the essay collection Southern Comforts (LSU Press, 2020); as well as the journals PMLA, College Literature, and the Southern Literary Journal (later south). You can find more info at www.katharineaburnett.com
Michelle Joan Papillion is a land steward, grower and arts entrepreneur working in Louisiana.  Her work is research & observation based and is centered around the topics of shared economics, food systems and cultural heritage preservation. She spends a great deal of time documenting changes on her land and preserving the stories of the people that come from that land.

In 2020, Michelle created an oral history archive that consists of audio and video recordings of communities in Southwest LA. The archive is meant to preserve what they felt was important to be remembered long after their departure. Michelle has been interviewed and profiled in numerous publications and podcasts about her work in arts and culture and have given a TEDx talk about her practices on both. Her farm is called Royal Queen Farms and is a project meant to generate healing, calm, legacy and beauty. The farm grows food, flowers and native herbs and botanicals.Michelle is the co-founder of the Cudmén Cooperative. It is a collective of growers, land stewards, creatives and elders, that work together to build the future they want to actualize. Their mission is about creating sustainable practices that protects our eco-system while enabling mutual elevation amongst the collective.

Panel 02 :care + Adaptation Across the southern landscape
 10.18 SATURDAY 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM


Shane Mitchell; Journalist and author Shane Mitchell frequently reports on consequential crops and food histories in the American South. She has five James Beard Foundation awards, including the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing prize in 2023 for her essay "Blood Sweat & Tears" on field labor abuse. Her book The Crop Cycle: Stories with Deep Roots was longlisted for the Pen America Art of the Essay prize earlier this year. These stories are framed by personal connections to Southern culture but also address broader conversations tied to race, labor relations, civil rights, and agriculture. Her most recent story for The Bitter Southerner Issue #11, "The Unusual Door," is partly set in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Catherine Coleman Flowers is an internationally recognized environmental activist, MacArthur “genius” grant recipient and author. She has dedicated her life’s work to advocating for environmental justice, primarily equal access to clean water and functional sanitation for communities across the United States.

Founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ), Flowers has spent her career promoting equal access to clean water, air, sanitation and soil to reduce health and economic disparities in marginalized, rural communities. Flowers sits on the Board of Directors for the Climate Reality Project, the Natural Resources Defense Council and RMI, as well as serving as a Practitioner in Residence position at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.

In 2021, her leadership and fervor in fighting for solutions to these issues led her to one of her most notable appointments yet — Vice Chair of the Biden Administration’s inaugural White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. In 2023, she was recognized as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the world and was featured on Forbes’ 50 Over 50 list. Flowers is the author of the newly-released Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope and Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret. Holy Ground is an inspiring collection of unflinching essays, personal and political, that frames the challenges we face as a society and — with grace, generosity, and hope — charts the way toward equity, respect, and a brighter future.  

In Waste, Flowers shares her inspiring story of advocacy, from childhood to environmental justice champion, and discusses sanitation and its correlation with systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that affects people across the United States.

Flowers and her work have been profiled by CBS’s 60 Minutes, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, The Guardian, PBS Newshour and more.

Learn more at www.catherinecolemanflowers.com.

Kim Smith is dedicated to community conservation and Indigenous advancement. She leads regional initiatives, fosters community-led conservation efforts, and advocates for environmental stewardship. In addition to her conservation work, Kim is the proud owner of Tali Elohi, an Indigenous-led business offering consultation services that harness the strength of diversity to craft innovative strategies. Tali Elohi goes beyond consulting by promoting Indigenous identity through fashion and design, enriching communities with creativity and tradition. Kim’s fashion designs and models have hit the US runways across the continent. Rooted in her Ancestral homelands, Kim divides her time between Knoxville, TN, and Cherokee, NC, where she resides with her two daughters. Together, they enjoy playing softball and immersing themselves in local Indigenous perspectives during their frequent travels. Kim's academic background includes a BA in French and World Business, as well as an MBA in Entrepreneurship & Innovation with specializations in Marketing and Nonprofit Management from the University of Tennessee.

Panel 03 : Reimagining a better south
 10.18 SATURDAY 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM


Ashon Crawley is professor of religious studies and African American and African studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Blackpentecostal Breath: the Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press, 2016) and The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press, 2020). His audiovisual art has been featured at Second Street Gallery, Bridge Projects, the California African American Museum, and the National Mall in Washington, DC. All his work is about otherwise possibility.

J.T. Roane is author of the award winning book Dark Agoras Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU 2023). He co-directs the Black Ecologies Lab at Rutgers.  Roane's work has been supported with fellowships from Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard's Charles Warren Center, and the Schomburg Library and Research Center, New York Public Library as well as grants from the Social Science Research Council and the Spencer Foundation.  Roane currently serves on the board for an Indigenous and Black led food and environmental justice organization in Virginia's Tidewater, Just Harvest.  Tiffany Sturdivant (she/her) is a Florida-born, Mississippi-raised Southern girl. In her former career, she was a healthcare professional (Nurse) for 13 years. Her expertise spanned across home healthcare, pediatrics and geriatrics. She was also a community activist in Columbus, MS, where she spent a decade leading a youth-based nonprofit organization focused on growing the community through fun and festivals. Tiffany is a voting rights advocate and has assisted with voting rights restoration in both Mississippi and Alabama. Now a resident of Eastern Kentucky, she is Executive Director of Appalshop. She is also lead organizer of Performing Our Future, a national coalition of four delegations (Alabama, Kentucky, Maryland, and Wisconsin) where we co-create and share knowledge to collectively own what we make. She enjoys singing, dancing and changing the world one day at a time.