NATCHEZ &8212; Three well-known Southern writers will receive top honors at the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration to be held Feb. 23-26 at the Natchez Convention Center.

William Ferris and Noel Polk are winners of the annual Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award; Beth Henley will receive the Horton Foote Award for achievement in screenwriting.

Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran will present the awards at 5 p.m. Feb. 25. Cochran also will be an honoree at the awards program.

&8220;Sen. Cochran knows all three of these award winners, and he is a huge supporter of the humanities,&8221; said Carolyn Vance Smith, founder and co-chairman of the Celebration.

Ferris, perhaps best known for &8220;Encyclopedia of Southern Culture,&8221; which he co-edited with Charles Wilson, for nearly 20 years was director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

He now is senior associate director at the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Polk, a professor of English at Mississippi State University and editor of The Mississippi Quarterly, taught at University of Southern Mississippi from 1977 to 2004.

He has lectured on Mississippi writers William Faulkner and Eudora Welty throughout the world.

Henley, a native of Jackson, received wide acclaim for her first professionally produced play, &8220;Crimes of the Heart,&8221; which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play of 1981.

Henley&8217;s screenplay &8220;Miss Firecracker,&8221; starring Holly Hunter, Mary Steenburgen and Tim Robbins, will be aired at the Celebration, with a discussion afterward.

The winners were surprised and pleased when notified about the awards, Smith said.

&8220;All three immediately said they could be here to accept the award and were looking forward to the conference,&8221; she said.

Polk said he is honored to receive the Richard Wright award.

&8220;I&8217;m very proud to be honored in this way by the people in my home state,&8221; he said.

&8220;It&8217;s always a hoot to come to Natchez for any reason, but to come to get an award makes it doubly sweet.&8221;

For Ferris, also, a chance to come to Natchez is pleasing, he said.

&8220;Growing up on a farm in Warren County near the Natchez Trace, I often traveled to Natchez and have warm memories of my visits to the city,&8221; Ferris said.

&8220;It is a special honor to receive the Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award,&8221; he added.

He described Wright as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, who &8220;rose above poverty and racial discrimination to create a literary achievement equivalent to that of Mississippi&8217;s other literary giants, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams.&8221;

The Wright award, established in 1994, honors the man born near Natchez in 1908, the son of a country schoolteacher and an uneducated sharecropper.

Wright&8217;s first novel, &8220;Native Son,&8221; published in 1940, was an immediate success. His &8220;Black Boy,&8221; a fictionalized autobiography was published in 1945.

The book sold 400,000 copies in three months.

The Foote award, established in 2002, honors the Oscar-winning and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer known for such screenplays as &8220;To Kill a Mockingbird&8221; and &8220;Of Mice and Men.&8221;

A committee chooses winners of both the Wright and Foote awards. David Sansing of the University of Mississippi is chairman of the Wright committee; actor and Mississippi native Gerald McRaney is chairman of the Foote award.

The three winners will be guests of honor on Feb. 25 at 5 p.m. for &8220;An Evening with the Stars,&8221; when they will receive awards and sign books, with a gala buffet dinner, &8220;Dining in Dixie,&8221; afterward at 6:15.