Richard Freis

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http://www.richardfreis.com

And contact me at

Richard@richardfreis.com

My novel, "Confession," began in a conversation with Eudora Welty, in which it struck me how relatively few southern novels contain characters shaped by the educated, upper middle class milieu from which Ms. Welty herself comes. I have always been an avid reader of suspense and mystery novels, as was Ms. Welty. So I decided to write a suspense novel set in that milieu, with a plot that had been with me for a number of years.

I have lived in Mississippi for almost forty years and love my adopted home state. My poetry has appeared in "Poetry," "The Southern Review," "Drastic Measures," and other magazines and anthologies. I have also published widely, both locally and nationally, as a literary and performing and visual arts journalist, scholar and spiritual director. My libretto for a cantata by Alva Henderson, "From Greater Light," based on the story of Job, had its world premiere in 2008 in Los Angeles with the Pacific Symphony.

At Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi I have been a professor of classical studies, director of the innovative Heritage Program, designer of the Leadership Seminars in the Humanities, and was one of the founders and the first president of the Mississippi International Ballet Competition. I retired more than twenty years ago when I became ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the same illness that Lauren Hillenbrand, the author of "Seabiscuit" and "Unbroken," is chained and liberated by and has written about so accurately in her July 7, 2003 "New Yorker" article.