JAY WATSON is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English and Howry Emeritus Professor of Faulkner Studies at the University of Mississippi. He is author or editor of twenty-one published or forthcoming books, including Fossil Fuel Faulkner: Energy, Modernity, and the U.S. South, which won the 2023 C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature; William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity, which won the 2020 Holman Award; and two University of Georgia Press publications, Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985, which received Honorable Mention for the 2013 Holman Award, and Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner. He lives and writes in Mississippi and North Carolina.