On this episode of MFP Live, Donna Ladd and Kimberly Griffin speak to journalist, filmmaker and teacher Ellen Ann Fentress. They discussed Ellen Ann’s years as a student at Pillow Academy, a segregation academy near Greenwood, Mississippi, and how she came to terms with her time there and the way it shaped her. They also discussed how a reflection essay written in 2019 led her to create "The Academy Stories," an online forum examining segregation academies’ impact on their recent and past graduates. Ellen Ann is a native of Greenwood, Mississippi. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Oxford American, The Bitter Southerner, The Baffler and Mississippi Public Broadcasting.
Ellen Ann is a member of the Mississippi Free Press Advisory Board.
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