Lex Allen Literary Festival
Date and Time
Saturday Apr 1, 2017
Website
Description
Lex Allen Literary Festival
Saturday, April 1, 9:30 am
Frances Niederer Auditorium, Richard Wetherill Visual Arts Center
9:30 – check-in and refreshments, 2nd floor lobby
10:30 – reading by Crystal Wilkinson
11:30 – poetry panel discussing student-submitted work
12:45 – luncheon, Moody Dining Hall (pay at the door)
2:00 – reading by Li-Young Lee
3:15 – reading by Barbara Hurd
4:00 – reception, 2nd floor lobby
Barbara Hurd’s books include Listening to the Savage/River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies; Tidal Rhythms: Change and Resilience at the Edge of the Sea (with photographer Stephen Strom); Stepping Into the Same River Twice (with artist Patricia Hilton); and Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals including Best American Essays, The Georgia Review, and The Yale Review. She is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, the NEA Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, the Sierra Club’s National Nature Writing Award, three Pushcart Prizes, and five Maryland State Arts Council Awards.
Li-Young Lee is the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins for spring 2017. He is the author of Behind My Eyes; Book of My Nights, which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; The City in Which I Love You, which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose, which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. His other work includes The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, a memoir that received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Other accolades include a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, and three Pushcart Prizes.
Crystal Wilkinson, whose latest novel is Birds of Opulence, has been applauded for her efforts to promote the creative work of African Americans in Appalachia. She has been nominated for both the Orange Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and has been recognized by the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts. She is also a recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature. Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries are among her other works. Wilkinson’s short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the Appalachian anthology Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean.
Funding provided by the John Alexander and Mary Josephine Haynes Allen Literary Endowment, the Dee Hull Everist Visiting Speaker Series, and the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence Fund.