Jackson Academy English teacher Sara Bannerman had her scholarship on one of Mississippi’s most celebrated authors published this year in a national academic journal.
Bannerman’s article, “Teacher as Tour Guide: Local Places in the Works of Eudora Welty,” appears in Volume 18 of the Eudora Welty Review, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The piece runs pages 141-144.
The opportunity came through a connection at Millsaps College. Michael Pickard invited Bannerman to write about teaching Welty after getting to know her through teacher workshops held at Welty’s Jackson home the past two years.
While Welty in this article, Bannerman said her writing often turns to the American South broadly, viewed through the lens of Southern gothic literature she has long admired.
“I’m a big fan of Southern gothic literature and enjoy trying to see the current South through that same lens,” she said.
That lens shapes how she teaches Mississippi authors in her classroom. “Now I find myself using Welty’s stories and their local simplicity to give my students a blade of grass from their own yard, the grit of their own driveway,” Bannerman said. “Not a souvenir from another world, but the familiar ‘pretties’ from their own homes.”
“Probably my main goal in teaching famous Mississippi authors to our students is to help them develop an appreciation for where they live,” she said. For Bannerman, what matters most is watching that appreciation take hold: students recognizing a piece of their own state inside literature respected far beyond it.
