Hubert Creekmore Literary Society Reading Series

Hubert Creekmore Literary Society Reading Series 2026-2027

featuring Jackson Writer Catherine Gray

The Magnolia Coffee Co. Event Space – The Drawing Room
428 N Main St, Water Valley, MS

Doors 6:30 PM – Open Mic 6:45 PM – Featured Author 7:00 PM followed by Q&A

Free and open to the public!

This is a FREE event!

The Magnolia Coffee Co. is proud to partner with the Hubert Creekmore Literary Society for an eight-month celebration of Mississippi writers, storytelling, and community. Together, we’ll welcome six featured literary readings, along with a series of open mic events to our shop – creating a space where readers, writers, and curious minds can gather, listen, share, and connect.

We’re especially excited to bring this series to Water Valley and to continue building on our belief that coffee shops have always been more than places to grab a cup of coffee; they can be places where ideas are exchanged, stories are told, and community happens. We hope you’ll join us throughout the series as we celebrate the writers and voices that make Mississippi’s literary landscape so special.

We’re so honored to welcome Catherine Simone Gray as our first author in this series for an evening of stories, conversation, and the kind of writing that invites us to look a little more closely at the lives we’re living and the stories we carry with us.

Catherine is a Mississippi writer whose work explores motherhood, identity, family, and the complicated beauty of becoming ourselves. We’re especially excited to hear from her about her debut memoir, Proud Flesh, and to share a little time together around her work.

Please join us in welcoming Catherine Simone Gray on Friday, October 9th at 7pm.

Catherine Simone Gray is a writer, educator, and author of the debut memoir Proud Flesh, which received the Mississippi Library Association 2026 Author Award for Non-Fiction. Featured by Roxane Gay as an Emerging Writer in The Audacity, Catherine’s essays have also appeared in The Bitter Southerner and the Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape. Her writings on her early blog Unsilenced Woman have reached 2.5 million readers, and she is the recipient of a Literary Arts Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission, in addition to project grants to lead community writing workshops for mothers and caregivers. She lives in Jackson with her husband and their two sons.