JoAnne Prichard Morris and Unita Blackwell. Photo by Nancy Jacobs
Major Works
- Once in a Lifetime: Reflections of a Mississippi First Lady (2015) editor, with Elise Varner Winter
- Pieces From the Past: Voices of Heroic Women in Civil Rights (2011) with Joan Mulholland and 11 more
- Barefootin’: Life Lessons From the Road to Freedom. (2006) with Unita Blackwell
- Yazoo: Its Legends and Legacies (1976) co-authored with Harriet DeCell
Biography of JoAnne Prichard Morris
Joanne Pritchard Morris at MSU. Photo by N. Jacobs
JoAnne Prichard Morris is a Mississippi native born in Indianola in 1944. She is a graduate of the University of Mississippi and did graduate work in folklore and Southern culture at Western Kentucky University. In 1967 she was teaching high school in Yazoo City when she met Willie Morris. She worked as executive editor at the University Press of Mississippi from 1983 to 1997, and in 1990, she became the second wife of the well-known writer Willie Morris, who died in 1999.
Her best known work is Barefootin’: Life Lessons From the Road to Freedom, written with Civil Rights activist Unita Blackwell. She is the co-author of Yazoo: Its Legends and Legacies (1976). She edited the memoir of Elise Varner Winter, William Winter’s wife called Once in a Lifetime: Reflections of a Mississippi First Lady, published in May, 2015.
Morris lives in Jackson, Mississippi.
Related Websites
- Excerpt from interview with Morris in 2009.
- Information about Joanne Prichard Morris and interview. Houghton Mifflin Books website.
- Amazon review of Yazoo
JoAnne Prichard Morris Visits Starkville
On April 18, 2002, JoAnne Prichard Morris, wife of the late Willie Morris, spoke in Starkville, Mississippi, at Mississippi State University about the writing techniques of her husband and his book My Mississippi, which is a collaboration of Willie Morris and his photojournalist son David Rae Morris. She also told some personal anecdotes of their life together. The photos below were taken that night.
Morris before her presentation in the Grisham Room at the MSU library, photo by N. Jacobs
JoAnne Pritchard Morris and Dr. Nancy Hargrove, professor of English at MSU. Photo by Nancy Jacobs