Several artists with ties to Oxford received awards from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters recently.

Each year the Institute of Arts and Letters honors creative individuals with an award in their specific field.

The awards, first made in 1980, are presented in nine categories: fiction, non-fiction, life writing, youth literature, visual art, music composition (classical), music composition (contemporary), photography and poetry. Judges are chosen from out of state and are prominent in their field.

Artists from or with ties to Oxford who were honored with an award were:

• Thad Lee won the Special Achievement Award for his film, “Two Lives in Photography,” first shown on Mississippi Public Broadcasting on Jan. 19, 2024. He lives with his visual-artist wife Carlyle Wolfe Lee and son Luke in Oxford.
• Oxford resident Erin Austen Abbot won a Citation of Merit for her annual art event, “The One Night Stand at the Ole Miss Motel.” The show aims to allow up-and-coming artists a chance to show their work. A motel room becomes that setting and their curated gallery for the evening.
• Charlie Buckley, of Oxford, won the Visual Arts award for his Fischer Galleries exhibit.
• Oxford author, Max Hipp, won the Fiction Award for his book, “What Doesn’t Kill You Opens Your Heart.”
• Adam Shemper won the Photography Award for his photography exhibit, “Light in These Hills: Oxford, Mississippi. Formerly an Oxford resident, he now resides in California.
• Historian Robert KD Colby, who teaches history at the University of Mississippi, won the Nonfiction Award for his book, “An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South.”
• Former Oxonian Jessica Fisher won the Poetry Award for her collection of poems titled “Daywork.” An Oxford High graduate, she now lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Supported by the Mississippi Institutes of Higher Learning and its members, MIAL is privately funded, self-perpetuating and non-profit.