The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters (MIAL) is a privately funded foundation created to recognize annually the greatest accomplishments in art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

, music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

, literature

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

, and photography among Mississippians. The idea was conceived by, among others, former Mississippi

Mississippi

Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...

 Governor

Governor

A governor is a governing official, usually the executive of a non-sovereign level of government, ranking under the head of state...

 William Winter

William Winter (politician)

William Forrest Winter is an American politician from Mississippi. He served as the 58th Governor of Mississippi from 1980 to 1984 as a Democrat. He is known for his strong support of public education, racial reconciliation, and historic preservation. Winter is best remembered for the passage of...

, Dr. Cora Norman, Dr. Aubrey Lucas, and Dr. Noel Polk in 1978, and the first awards were given out in 1980. Nominations for these awards may be made only by registered members of the Institute. The winners are chosen by a jury of prominent academics in each of the seven fields: Fiction, Non-fiction, Visual Art, Concert Musical Composition, Popular Musical Composition, Photography, and Poetry. The ceremony is held in a different Mississippi city each year. Past winners have included Walker Percy

Walker Percy

Walker Percy was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962...

, Ellen Douglas

Ellen Douglas

Ellen Douglas is the pen name of Josephine Ayres Haxton , an American author. Her book Apostles of Light was a National Book Award nominee.She was born in Natchez, Mississippi and grew up in Louisiana and Arkansas...

, Ellen Gilchrist, Richard Ford, Larry Brown

Larry Brown (author)

Larry Brown was an American novelist, non-fiction and short story writer. He was a winner of numerous awards including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for fiction, the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award, and Mississippi's Governor's Award For Excellence in the Arts...

, Rick Bass, Lewis Nordan, Beverly Lowry, Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt is an American writer and author of the novels The Secret History and The Little Friend . She won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend in 2003.-Early life:...

, Clifton Taulbert

Clifton Taulbert

Clifton Taulbert , is an American author and speaker. He is best known for his books Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored and Eight Habits of the Heart: Embracing the Values that Build Strong Communities...

, Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah

Howard Barry Hannah was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi.The author of eight novels and five short story collections , Hannah worked with notable American editors and publishers such as Gordon Lish, Seymour Lawrence, and Morgan Entrekin...

, Willie Morris

Willie Morris

William Weaks "Willie" Morris , was an American writer and editor born in Jackson, Mississippi, though his family later moved to Yazoo City, Mississippi, which he immortalized in his works of prose. Morris' trademark was his lyrical prose style and reflections on the American South, particularly...

, Leontyne Price

Leontyne Price

Mary Violet Leontyne Price is an American soprano. Born and raised in the Deep South, she rose to international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s, and was one of the first African Americans to become a leading artist at the Metropolitan Opera.One critic characterized Price's voice as "vibrant",...

, Cynthia Shearer, Stephen Ambrose

Stephen Ambrose

Stephen Edward Ambrose was an American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a long time professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many best selling volumes of American popular history...

, Steve Yarbrough, Tom Franklin, Brad Watson, Shelby Foote

Shelby Foote

Shelby Dade Foote, Jr. was an American historian and novelist who wrote The Civil War: A Narrative, a massive, three-volume history of the war. With geographic and cultural roots in the Mississippi Delta, Foote's life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the...

, Natasha Tretheway, Birney Imes, Maude Schyler Clay, William Grant Still

William Grant Still

William Grant Still was an African-American classical composer who wrote more than 150 compositions. He was the first African American to conduct a major American symphony orchestra, the first to have a symphony performed by a leading orchestra, the first to have an opera performed by a major...

, Morgan Freeman, Christopher Maurer, Wyatt Waters, Logan Skelton, and many others. Lifetime achievement awards have been presented to artists such as Gulf Coast painter and potter Walter Anderson, Jackson writer Eudora Welty, and the distinguished film actor from the Delta, Morgan Freeman.