“House of Smoke” with John T. Edge

Join us on Monday, November 3, at 6 p.m. for Clinton Presidential Center Presents: "House of Smoke" with John T. Edge, writer and host of ESPN’s TrueSouth and author of the new memoir “House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home.”

In his unflinching and moving memoir, Edge takes readers on a quest for home in a South that has both held him close and pushed him away, as he tries and fails and tries again to rewrite the stories he inherited.

Beginning in Georgia and concluding in Mississippi, his search spans the Deep South and charts a very American story of the truth-telling and soul searching it takes to love your people and your place.

BOOK: Edge will sign copies of "House of Smoke" following the program. Click here to purchase your copy from the Clinton Museum Store, available for pick up at the event or post-event delivery.

The program will be available on our YouTube channel the following day.

ASL interpretation is available during our events.

Clinton Presidential Center Presents is a partnership between the Clinton Foundation, Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, and Clinton Presidential Library.

More about the speaker:

TrueSouth, which broadcasts on the SEC Network and ESPN and streams on ESPN+, Hulu, and Disney+, tells an honest story about the complicated, flawed, and beautiful place Edge calls home. To do that, he sidesteps nostalgia and myth and stereotype to introduce viewers to Southerners who struggle and succeed, dream and fail, and then try again.

Edge serves as writer-in-residence for the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. He is also the director of the Mississippi Lab, and is the developer of the new Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, set on William Faulkner’s onetime mule farm.

His previous book, “The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South,” was named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, and a host of others. Edge is a contributing editor at Garden & Gun and,, for 22 years served as a columnist for the Oxford American. For three years, he wrote the “United Tastes” column for The New York Times.

Winner of the 2018 nonfiction prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, he was inducted into the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame in 2019. Since 2015, Edge has served the University of Georgia's Grady School of Journalism as a distinguished professor of practice in the low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction.

Edge earned an M.A. in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi and an M.A. in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College.

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