Not only was all of America’s original music–blues, country, rock ‘n’ roll, and jazz–invented within a small geographical area known as the Mojo Triangle, so was the country’s most soulful and creative literature given birth within that same small patch of fertile land.

Mojo Rising: Masters of the Art pay tribute to that literature with short stories by Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Faulkner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright (generally regarded as one of the top three African American writers in American history), noted Civil War historian and novelist Shelby Foote, author Willie Morris (legendary editor of Harper’s Magazine in the 1960s, novelist, and journalist), American Book Award winner Ellen Gilchrist (who contributed a previously unpublished story), Stark Young, New York Times drama critic and author of So Red the Rose, Elizabeth Spencer (graduate of Belhaven College and Vanderbilt University; University of Mississippi creative writing instructor; five-time winner of the O. Henry Award for short fiction, ) and novelist and short writer Ellen Douglas, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and in the O. Henry collection of prize stories.

As an art form, the short story has been shunted to the fringe of literary expression, says Sartoris Literary Group publisher James L. Dickerson. We want to keep the short story alive–and the best way to do that is to provide it with a loving home. To that end we plan to publish each year an anthology of contemporary writers who are associated with the Mojo Triangle.

What is the Mojo Triangle?

Draw a straight line from New Orleans to Nashville, then over to Memphis and back down to New Orleans following the curves of the Mississippi River, and you have the Mojo Triangle, a geometrical, cultural, and spiritual configuration that represents the geographical birthplace of America’s original music–Country, Blues, Jazz, and Rock ‘n’ Roll–and its most soulful and innovative literature.