Born and raised in Memphis, Reverend John Wilkins has roots in North Mississippi. On his latest CD, You Can’t Hurry God (Big Legal Mess), his music rocks with a nod to Memphis beats and Mississippi Hill Country blues. His rousing live performances now feature Wilkins’s three daughters adding soulful back-up vocals.

Wilkins’ father was the influential musician the Rev. Robert Wilkins, whose song “Prodigal Son” was later covered by the Rolling Stones.

Michael Martone’s latest book is the quirky story collection The Moon Over Wapakoneta: Fictions and Science Fictions From Indiana and Beyond (University of Alabama Press). In it, Martone chronicles his native Midwest with a keen eye, his trademark experimental story structures, and his gift for finding the marvelous in the mundane.

These off-beat stories include time travel across time zones from Ohio to Indiana, the “death” of baseball’s Derek Jeter, a convention of reanimated William Faulkners, how a beer bottle can serve as a telescope, and how the Amish power their spaceships with windmills.

“Once again, the Mark Twain of metafiction offers us a collection of fictions and beautiful universes—including our own.”

—Alexander Weinstein, author of Children of the New World: Stories

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