A native of Jackson, Mississippi, Donald Mangum earned a PhD from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. His fiction has appeared in a number of periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Florida Review, Mississippi Review, Indiana Review, and Confrontation, and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize as well as published or republished in various textbooks. He lives with his wife on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where he teaches philosophy and English.

The Roar Beneath
Hank is a professor at a state college on the Mississippi Gulf Coast who ponders questions about his brother/colleague’s sanity as well as his professional self-destruction, self-exile, and eventual disappearance in a coastal swamp. Hank enters into an uneasy, sexually tense friendship with Callie, an emotionally unbalanced colleague with nebulous family ties to an underground power structure which has suffused Hank’s own world in ways he has never suspected, including his brother’s disappearance and the identity and death of Hank’s wife. Then there is Horace: physically grotesque and presumed to be mentally challenged, who becomes an unlikely sage in Hank’s attempt to recover something of himself. In the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, the series of revelations increases in intensity, the Gulf becomes more erratic, intensifying along with the crises in the characters’ lives, and reaches its crescendo in Katrina’s landfall and concludes in her aftermath.