Biography
A native of Mississippi, Benjamin Morris is a poet, writer, and researcher, and the author of Coronary (Fitzgerald Letterpress, 2011), Hattiesburg, Mississippi: A History of the Hub City (Arcadia/The History Press, 2014), and Ecotone (Antenna/Press Street Press, 2017). His work appears in such places as The Oxford American, The Southern Review, The Guardian, and The Scottish Review of Books, and has received fellowships and residencies from the Mississippi Arts Commission, Tulane University, and A Studio in the Woods. Among other honors, he has received a Pushcart nomination, the Academy of American Poets Prize from Duke University, and the Chancellor’s Medal for Poetry from the University of Cambridge. Formerly a researcher at the Open University and the University of Edinburgh (UK), he is a member of the Mississippi Artist Roster.
Research
The Call is a new work of fiction set in a small town in eastern Alabama, in the late 1970s amid the disillusionment and malaise after the Vietnam War. This novel tells the story of John Rainbolt, a young pastor who returns home after years away to take over the post of his childhood church: despite his roots in the area, ministering to his flock proves more difficult than he expected, as he meets not only with resistance from the community but unforeseen struggles from within. Amid his efforts come two encounters that put test his beliefs to the test: one, the rekindling of an old flame Rainbolt had thought extinguished, a romance that threatens his position at the church, and two, a growing conflict with a combat-scarred veteran whose anarchic ideology poses a direct challenge to his beliefs. As these three figures become locked into an increasingly destructive orbit, Rainbolt is forced to risk everything in order to save not just his church but the lives of those he loves. A portrait of a man grappling with demons both internal and external, The Call ultimately asks one central question: what are the true costs of a faith, and who is prepared to pay the price that it exacts?
This 2018 Monroe Fellowship will sponsor travel to eastern Alabama to explore the many overlapping landscapes—social, physical, cultural, and theological—of this novel. Funding two separate research trips in seasons that contain the greatest activity in the book (summer and winter), this fellowship will greatly aid the adoption of a specific Southern landscape into fiction, a process that comes as much by immersion as by imagination.
