MURFREESBORO
— MTSU is
upholding nearly 80 years of student writing tradition by serving as host for
the 2016 Southern Literary Festival March 24-26, which will feature writing
workshops, readings and master classes for students, as well as special guests
Ann Patchett and Minton Sparks in free public appearances.
Patchett,
author of the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel “Bel Canto,” will offer the festival’s keynote address
and sign books Friday, March 25, beginning at 6 p.m. in MTSU’s Student Union
Ballroom.
Sparks, an author, performance artist and native of
Murfreesboro, will perform at 9 p.m. March 25 in MTSU’s Tucker Theatre.
Both special events are free and open to the
public. A searchable campus map is available at http://tinyurl.com/MTSUParkingMap.
The Southern Literary Festival is an organization
of Southern colleges and schools founded in 1937 at Mississippi’s Blue Mountain
College to promote Southern literature. Each year a different university
hosts the festival, which is an undergraduate writing conference for a wide
variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, playwriting and nonfiction.
Authors associated with the festival over the years
have included such luminaries as Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Katherine Anne
Porter, John Gould Fletcher and Flannery O’ Connor, along with co-founder
Robert Penn Warren. More recently, authors Frances Mayes and Natasha Trethewey
have been among the festival’s guests.
This
year’s event is open to all MTSU students and faculty as well as students and
faculty from the festival’s member schools around the region.
“Southern literature keeps getting redefined,”
explains Dr. Jennifer Kates, an MTSU English professor and the organizer of
this year’s Southern Literary Festival.
“We reached out to all our local authors, too. We're
not just country music. We were surprised to hear how many people outside
Murfreesboro and the region think of Murfreesboro and MTSU as a center for
creative writing. … We've got a reputation. A lot of people come home to roost
here or come out of our programs.”
Patchett
also is the author of five other novels, including “The Patron Saint of Liars,” and three nonfiction works. She’s been a
Nashville resident since childhood and is co-founder and owner of Parnassus
Books.
A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Patchett also has become a
spokeswoman for independent booksellers around the country. In
2012, Time magazine named her as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the
World.
You can watch Patchett’s 2012 appearance on Comedy
Central’s “The Colbert Report” to learn more about her bookstore — and reading
— advocacy at http://ow.ly/ZxNxx.
Sparks has earned international renown for her
storytelling prowess, which blends her always poetic — and often rambunctious —
tales of poor rural folks with the music of an accompanying guitarist.
The former social worker and divinity school student
has written two books, released three CDs and a DVD and presents writing/performance
workshops across the country. She was a 2015 Fellow at the Vanderbilt Curb
Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy and is the 2016 artist in
residence at Canada’s Banff Performing Arts Center.
You can get a preview of Sparks’ work in this video
from her “Gold Digger” CD release show at Nashville’s Bluebird Café: http://youtu.be/j-SOFHlMwxI.
For more
information about this year’s Southern Literary Festival at MTSU, visit http://www.southernliteraryfestival.org
or contact Kates at jennifer.kates@mtsu.edu.
The
festival is sponsored at MTSU by the Department of English, the College of
Liberal Arts, Department of Theatre and Dance, the University Honors College,
the College of Media and Entertainment and the Office of the Provost. Sparks’ performance
is also sponsored by the Department of Recording Industry, the Virginia Peck
Fund and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.
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