W. Ralph Eubanks

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

W. Ralph Eubanks is a writer and essayist whose work focuses on race, identity, and the culture and literature of the American South. His most recent book, A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through A Real and Imagined Literary Landscape (Timber Press, 2021), examines how a small state that rests by the banks of a great river has made so many contributions to American letters, carrying an outsized role in the national imagination. He is also the author of two other works of nonfiction, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past (Basic Books, 2003) and The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South (Smithsonian, 2009). He is a visiting professor of English and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi.

At Radcliffe, Eubanks will work on a new book that looks at the culture and history of the Mississippi Delta. He wants to develop a narrative about the Delta that weaves together personal history, archival research, reporting, blues and popular culture, interviews with current Mississippi Delta residents, and character-driven storytelling.

Eubanks has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a National Fellow at New America. His writing has been published in the American Scholar, the Georgia Review, the Hedgehog Review, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He received his BA from the University of Mississippi and an MA in English language and literature at the University of Michigan.

Radcliffe Fellow W. Ralph Eubanks Discusses the Mississippi Delta (Harvard Crimson, 2/16/22)