John T Edge & Jim Gulley are 2026 Faulkner Literary Luncheon Speakers: Get tickets by Sept 23 -

The annual Faulkner Literary Luncheon is set for September 25, 2026, at 11:30 at the First Methodist Church with guest speakers writers and historians John T. Edge and Jim Gulley, both part of the Greenfield Farm Project.

Greenfield Farm is located at the edge of Lafayette and Union Counties and was once William Faulkner’s Mule Farm. It is becoming Mississippi’s first writer’s retreat

The annual awards for the winners of the William Faulkner Literary Competition, which has turned into an international contest, will be also presented.

John T Edge, author House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home, writes and hosts the National Emmy Award-winning television show TrueSouth, now in its ninth season.

He has written or edited more than a dozen other books including The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the American South. Edge is a widely published magazine writer who now serves Garden & Gun as a columnist.

From 1999 through 2021, Edge directed the Southern Foodways Alliance. At the University of Mississippi, he now serves as a Writer-in-Residence and leads development of Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, set on William Faulkner’s onetime mule farm. Edge lives in Oxford with his wife, the artist Blair Hobbs.

Jim Gulley is a native Mississippian who retired from The Coca-Cola Company in 2018 after a twenty-eight-year career that included stints in Bottler Operations and Global Commercial Strategy. In 2020, he embarked on a second career in academia, earning an MA in History from the University of Mississippi in 2023 and beginning a doctoral program in history from Southern Methodist University later that year. He is currently a doctoral candidate at SMU, working on his dissertation, with an anticipated graduation in May 2027. He is also an Adjunct Instructor in History at Ole Miss teaching HST 1300 (U.S. to 1877) this fall.

Gulley is an Americanist specializing in 20th-century U.S. history, with a focus on the American South, African American history, and the history of Christianity. In 2022, John T. Edge appointed Gulley as the Research Fellow for the Greenfield Farm Writers Residency project. A result of his research was “Greenfield Farm: Faulkner, Mules, and Time,” published in The Journal of Mississippi History in its Spring/Summer 2025 edition. (See link below to Gulley’s article.)

Jim and his wife, Tracie, live in Oxford and have three grown children and four grandchildren. He is a ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church in America and enjoys golfing in Scotland.

Cost of the luncheon is $20, and September 23 is the deadline to register and pay. Go to the QR Code with this article or go to https://ucheritagemuseum.com/calendar/ and click on September 25, click on the link to sign up and pay. For more information call 662-538-0014.

Greenfield Farm: Faulkner, Mules, and Time by Jim Gulley