When I was growing up in Mississippi - it was good Southern food... but I also grew up with a Greek family when other kids were eating fried okra we were eating steamed artichokes. So I think it played a big part in my healthy cooking.

Mississippi Mermaid was a very special experience because we only had the dialogues for the scenes we were shooting the night before.

The Klan had used fear intimidation and murder to brutally oppress over African-Americans who sought justice and equality and it sought to respond to the young workers of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the same way.

Freedom Summer the massive voter education project in Mississippi was 1964. I graduated from high school in 1965. So becoming active was almost a rite of passage.

We're first on executions. We're 49th in funding public education. We're in a race with Mississippi for the bottom and we're winning.

Baseball is the president tossing out the first ball of the season. And a scrubby schoolboy playing catch with his dad on a Mississippi farm.

The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel Mississippi.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.