"The Civil War's Imprint on Southern Culture": That's the theme the 2013 Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration sets out to consider, and some of the country’s most respected historians, authors, and scholars are coming to shed light on how the war influenced not only military leaders and historians, but legions of creative types. Co-founder Carolyn Vance Smith of Copiah-Lincoln Community College, notes, “The agenda is full of references to the war in the fields of fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry, film, music, painting, sculpture and re-enacting." According to Smith, the NLCC will also explore physical references to the war in Natchez houses, churches, cemeteries and other sites.

The keynote speaker this year will be the noted professor and author William Cooper of Louisiana State University, whose program is entitled “1863: Year of Crucial Decisions.” Other topics to take in will be: Faulkner's Civil Wars; Celebrating the Sesquicentennnial? Complexities and Ambiguities in Remembering the Civil War; Reading/Seeing Between the Lines: Fact and Fiction in ‘Miss Jane Pittman’ and Subsequent Slave Narratives; Art of Commemoration: Vicksburg National Military Park; and Re-enactment: History by the People, of the People, and for the People.

Three Civil War-inspired films are on the agenda, too, along with tours of historic sites Longwood, Rosalie (Union headquarters during the war), The Burn, the Natchez City and National cemeteries, and Forks of the Road, where slaves were bought and sold until 1863. Scads of other social, musical, and dining events, and most of the conference is free of charge. (601) 446-1289 or colin.edu/nlcc for full details.