W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of When It’s Darkness on the Delta: How America’s Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land.

When It’s Darkness on the Delta traces the enduring consequences of political decisions that have entrenched inequality in the Mississippi Delta across generations and in places like the Delta across the United States. At the same time, this book brings attention to the resilience of local communities and the grassroots movements working toward meaningful change and offers a thoughtful framework for policy reform and community investment.

Eubanks is the author of three other works of nonfiction: A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through A Real and Imagined Literary Landscape (Timber Press),  Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi's Dark Past (Basic Books), and The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South (HarperCollins). He has contributed articles to the Washington Post Outlook and Style sections, WIRED, The Hedgehog Review,The Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, The New Yorker, and National Public Radio. A graduate of the University of Mississippi (B.A.) and the University of Michigan (M.A., English Language and Literature), he is a recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he was a national fellow at the New America Foundation, and was the 2021-2022 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Ralph lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Colleen. 

From 1995 to 2013 Eubanks was director of publishing for the Library of Congress and is the former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia. In February 2023 he was awarded the Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award for excellence in literature and as a cultural ambassador for Mississippi. Currently he is the faculty fellow and writer-in-residence at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.