Jamie Quatro

From The OA's Mississippi Music Issue, 2011: "The Hilltops, still in their early twenties, are riding the crest of Oxford’s Golden Age. The town has become a creative Mecca of sorts—“The Vatican City of Southern Letters,” according to Pat Conroy. The literary Big Dogs are in plain sight: Hannah, Brown, Grisham, Morris. The music scene is thriving. Fat Possum Records is recording hill-country bluesmen R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough; bands like Mud Boy & The Neutrons and The Grifters come through Oxford to perform. The Memphis photographer William Eggleston can sometimes be seen lurking around The Square, which is still the locus of business in Oxford."

Despite the fact that he’s published eight novels and four story collections (his first novel, GERONIMO REX, was a National Book Award nominee and his last collection, HIGH LONESOME, a Pulitzer Prize finalist), Barry Hannah remains a cult figure: You’ve either never heard of him, or you can rattle off long passages of his prose and work up a sweat debating whether or not he’s a successor to Faulkner.