Chilly Billy Howell

Chilly Billy Howell, also writing as Malachi Montroy, is a Delta-born philosopher, poet, and storyteller born in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He is the co-founder of The Delta Bohemian, an online chronicle devoted to celebrating the constancy and diversity of life in the Mississippi Delta. Through that platform and others, he has published scores of essays, reflections, short stories, and recordings under a variety of pen names, exploring faith, place, paradox, and the textures of everyday life.

Though descended from multi-generational Mississippi Delta families, he spent two decades out West pursuing a wide range of opportunities in business, education and theology. Those years away ultimately prepared him to “come home” and examine his own elephant’s graveyard through thought, aphorisms and poems.

Howell is also the storytelling docent and guide of Delta Bohemian Tours, where he leads visitors from around the world through the history, culture, and lived realities of the Mississippi Delta.

As Malachi Montroy, Howell distills a lifetime of living, loving, and listening into aphorisms and poems marked by wit, honesty, and spiritual insight. His aphorisms are rooted in lived experience, offering paradoxical wisdom that is felt as much as understood. His poems, by contrast, move like prayer: slower, softer, and open to mystery and silence.

Chilly Billy lives, writes, and paddles in the Mississippi Delta with his wife, Madge and their dog Dandy.