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Warren Hines
Off the Cuff
Warren Hines is a rising comedian from Greenville, MS, now living in the Pacific Northwest. He adores driving long distances in order to embrace new local cultures and experiences. In 2010, he drove north from the Augusta Lighthouse in Western Australia to Kununurra. From Mississippi he logged over 4,000 miles driving to Fairbanks, Alaska during 2017-2018. Being from Mississippi, Warren thrives on the blues and Americana music. Although he always loves his trips home to Mississippi, he thrives on meeting new people and embracing new cultures.
Lee Blaylock
Nostalgia and Finding the Story
Lee Blaylock is a Mississippi Delta native. He began writing at the age of eleven. He attended the University of Southern Mississippi, where he majored in Film Production. For over a decade, he worked as a freelance videographer and photographer. Along the way, he and his wife started their own company, Blaylock Imagery. Behind the camera, Lee has worked in both television and film. This year, he’s sold two feature-length screenplays to the Dallas-based production company, Bonfire Legend. Currently, Lee is developing the first streaming television series for one of America’s fastest-growing media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment: The Daily Wire. Lee lives in Northwest Arkansas with his wife and two sons.
Church Goin Mule
Art and Connection of Place
Church Goin Mule is a southern artist who was born and raised across the South, her kinfolk came from the mountains, though she lives in the swamp of Louisiana now. Church Goin Mule's work is a memory jug, a death-vase mash of the collective southern past, pearls and rusted nails, song and story, lore and loss. The mule is our common ground, the creature that every man, woman and child of all origin knew, in a time before t-models and tractors. In a time of remarkable and perhaps increasing polarity, the mule is our grounding rod, pointing to not a better past, but a different one. The blues was born behind a plowing mule.
Travis Shallow
The Art of Storytelling
Travis Shallow is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and recording artist. Shallow has supported such acts as legend Gregg Allman from The Allman Brothers, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real (son of legend Willie Nelson), The Marcus King Band, Jerry Joseph, Todd Snider, and fellow native North Carolina band, American Aquarium.
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Jennifer Drinkwater
Art and Creative Placemaking
A Mississippi Delta native, Jennifer Drinkwater is an artist, an associate professor of art & visual culture and the community arts specialist for extension and outreach at Iowa State University. Jennifer explores how we bring artwork from the studio into the world, and how art-making can both build and shape community.