Hey, look who’s going to be speaking at the Walker Percy Weekend here in St. Francisville on June 6-8:

Wilfred McClay is a cultural historian who holds the Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. He served on the National Council for the Humanities, the advisory committee of the National Endowment for the Humanities, from 2002 – 2012.

Peter Augustine Lawler is a political philosopher who serves as Dana Professor of Government at Berry College in Georgia, a former member of the president’s Council on Bioethics, and the author of 15 books.

Ralph C. Wood is University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University, and teaches in the college’s religion and English departments, as well as in its Great Texts program. He has written extensively on Southern literature and Christianity.

Micah Mattix teaches literature at Houston Baptist University. His reviews and commentaries on literature and culture have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, First Things, Books & Culture, and other prominent publications.

Leslie Marsh is a research associate on the University of British Columbia’s faculty of medicine. A political philosopher, he founded the Michael Oakeshott Association, and holds advanced degrees in several humanities fields, as well as in computer science and artificial intelligence.

Patrick Connelly is associate professor of History and director of the Honors Program at Montreat College in Montreat, NC.

Ari Schulman is executive editor of The New Atlantis, a magazine about science, technology, and morality, published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC.

Judge Caleb Stegall is a justice on the Kansas Court of Appeals. Prior to his appointment, he was chief counsel to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. Outside his legal career, Judge Stegall has long written about religions and the humanities, and was a founder of the online cultural journal The New Pantagruel.

Emily Erwin Jones is the University Archivist at Delta State University in Cleveland, Miss. A native of Greenville, Miss., she has studied the life and times of William Alexander Percy and the Percys of the Mississippi Delta.

Benjamin Bergholtz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Louisiana State University.

Got your tickets yet? Order them online here. You have less than 10 hours to get the Early Bird All-Inclusive Special. For now, we have only a limited number of tickets available for the Friday night craft beer and crawfish boil event, and for the Saturday night pig roast and oyster grilling. If we exceed demand in time to order more food, we will, but please don’t anticipate that you will be able to show up and buy a ticket to either event. We don’t want to disappoint you, but we’re doing this on a shoestring budget — all the above speakers are coming into town on their own dime — and we can’t afford to lay in extra crawfish, oysters, and the rest, to accommodate walk-ins.

Here’s a link to local lodging. This morning I talked to Miss Shirley at the Barrow House B&B, a historic district inn that’s a stone’s throw from where the panel discussions will be held; she told me she’s got five rooms left. I don’t know what the situation is like at the other places.