Don Allan Mitchell

Don Allan Mitchell was born in Texas, raised in Mississippi, and educated in Virginia. His article on the Reverend Al Green will be included in Musicians and Composers of the Twentieth Century, which will be published in May 2009 by Salem Press. In 2008, he successfully nominated poet Natasha Trethewey, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for the Mississippi Arts Commission’s Governor’s Awards for the Arts, and was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Canadian Press about Dr. Trethewey’s works. In 2007, he secured for Dr. Trethewey an honorary doctorate from Delta State University. In 2006, he was interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered about the proposed Mississippi state poem. From 2002 to 2005, he was the host of Highway 61, the Magnolia State’s longest running statewide blues radio program, on Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

Professor Mitchell is a sixth-generation Mississippian, and when he moved to Cleveland to teach at Delta State, he became a fourth-generation Deltan. 2009 is the centennial year of his grandfather’s birth at Pace, Mississippi, a few miles outside of Cleveland. His favorite Delta drive is the two-lane stretch of Highway 61 from Leland to Vicksburg. His favorite Delta tamales come from The White Front Café in Rosedale, with Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville coming in a close second. He is an assistant professor of English at Delta State University, where he regularly teaches blues literature and history classes.