Arkansas Literary Festival

Arkansas Literary Festival 

      Arkansas Literary Festival 2013 will be held April 18 - 21 in Little Rock and North Little Rock.

      This is the tenth year for the Festival, which features workshops, performances, readings, opportunities to meet authors, book signings and special events. More than 80 presenters will participate. Most of the events are free and will be held in the Central Arkansas Library System's Main Library campus and other venues in the River Market and Argenta. 

      This year's Festival authors have won an impressive number and variety of distinguished awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Newbery Honor, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Coretta Scott King Honor, the PEN/O. Henry Prize; the Pushcart Prize, the Barnes &amp, Noble Discover Prize for Fiction, the Pura Belpré Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. Many of the presenters' works have been translated into multiple languages and made into films.

      Special events include a cocktail reception with the authors, wine workshops, films, a play, and Spoken Word LIVE!, which is a city-wide poetry competition. 

       Children's events include a story time on the lawn of the Governor's Mansion, a book fiesta, The Artmobile, plays, outdoor activities, and Super Hero Activity Afternoon. Some Festival sessions for children will take place at the new Children’s Library, 4800 W. 10th Street, and the Youth Services Department at the Main Library, 100 Rock Street.

       At the Main Library’s teen center, there will be "zombie survival" activities, a video game tournament, and a writing workshop.  Teens will have the opportunity to meet authors and illustrators. 

       Through the Writers In The Schools initiative, the Festival will provide presentations by  authors in Pulaski county elementary, middle, and senior high schools and area colleges.

       The Festival is a project of the Central Arkansas Library System.  Brad Mooy is Festival Coordinator. Jay Jennings is the 2013 Festival Chair.   For more information, email Mr. Mooy at litfest@cals.org, call 918-3098 or visit arkansasliteraryfestival.org.  

      

 Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia, as well as the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer.  Mr. Brockmeier was born and raised in Little Rock, and he taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he received his MFA. He has won three O. Henry Prizes, along with the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction, the Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, the Booker Worthen Literary Prize, and the Porter Fund Literary Prize.  He lives in Little Rock.

Jay Jennings is a freelance writer and a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the San Francisco Chronicle. He has worked at Sports Illustrated and Tennis Magazine, and his work has been recognized in The Best American Sports Writing.   Mr. Jennings has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Oxford American, and Travel + Leisure.  He wrote Carry the Rock: Race, Football, and the Soul of an American City and edited the recent collection Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany.

Tim Gallagher is an award-winning author, wildlife photographer, magazine editor, and currently editor-in-chief of Living Bird. Gallagher spent several years traveling across the South, and then had a sighting of the legendary ivory-billed woodpecker. This sighting quickly led to the largest search ever launched to find a rare bird and ultimately to the announcement of the rediscovery of the species. His new book is Imperial Dreams: Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker through the Wild Sierra Madre.

Paula J. Giddings is the Elizabeth A. Woodson Professor of Afro-American Studies at Smith College. Her fourth book, Ida: A Sword Among Lions, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award and was deemed a best book of the year by The  Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune.

Ben Fountain has won many awards for his fiction, including a PEN/Hemingway Award for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara.  He has been honored with a Whiting Writer's Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and an O. Henry Award.  His Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and a Good Reads Choice Award.  He lives in Dallas.

Ben Katchor is a cartoonist best known for the strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. He is the author of the graphic novels Hand-Drying in America: And Other Stories, The Jew of New York, and The Cardboard Valise.   Mr. Katchor teaches at Parsons The New School for Design and has contributed to The New Yorker, The Forward, and Metropolis Magazine. He was the first cartoonist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship and is the subject of the offbeat film Pleasures of Urban Decay. He lives in New York.

Domingo Martinez has worked as a journalist and a designer in Texas and Seattle.  His work has appeared in Epiphany, and he has contributed to The  New Republic.  His book The Boy Kings of Texas was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award in the nonfiction category, and an excerpt from that book has been nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize.  Mr. Martinez lives in Seattle. 

Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and grew up in Little Rock. He is the author of more than ten works of fiction, including Rock Springs, Independence Day, and A Multitude of Sins. Independence Day was the first novel to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He has won the Rea Award for Short Story and the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction. Mr. Ford's  2012 novel, Canada, was a New York Times bestseller. He lives in Boothbay, Maine, and is Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.

C. D. Wright has published a dozen poetry collections, most recently One With Others, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, winner of the Lenore Marshall Award, and finalist for the National Book Award. Rising, Falling, Hovering won the International Griffin Prize for Poetry. One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, her collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster, was awarded the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize.  Steal Away was on the international shortlist of the Griffin Trust Award, and String Light won the Poetry Center Book Award.  Ms. Wright was born in Mountain Home.  She lives in Rhode Island and teaches at Brown University.  Earlier this year, she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.







Rita Williams-Garcia is a bestselling author of books for teens and younger readers. Her most recent novel, One Crazy Summer, was named a Newbery Honor Book, a National Book Award Finalist, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book, and a Scott O'Dell Award winner for Historical Fiction. The sequel, P.S. Be Eleven, will be released in June.  Ms. Williams-Garcia lives in Jamaica, New York and teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.










Dennis Vannatta has published four collections of stories and a novel.  He is winner of a Pushcart Prize and the Porter Fund Literary Prize.  His story collections are This Time, This Place, Prayers for the Dead, Lives of the Artists, and Rockaway Children – and a novel, Around Centralia Square. He is a professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Lydia Millet has written nine books and was awarded the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction for her 2002 novel, My Happy Life.  Known for her dark humor and wit, Ms. Millet's first novel, Omnivores, was published in 1996.  She was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Love in Infant Monkeys and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Magnificence.   She was a 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow.  She lives in Tucson. 

Kevin Moffett is the author of two books, Permanent Visitors, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events. He is a frequent contributor to McSweeney's, and his stories have received the National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award and the Pushcart Prize.  He was awarded a literature fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. The Silent History, a serialized digital novel he wrote with Matthew Derby, Russell Quinn and Eli Horowitz, was released as an app for mobile devices in the fall of 2012.

Darcy Pattison is an Arkansas children's book an author writing teacher.  Her work has been published in eight languages. Her nature book for children Wisdom; The Midway Albatross, was first-place winner in the 2013 Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards, Children's Picture Books. Desert Baths, which was a National Science Teachers Association Outstanding Science Trade Book in 2013.  She created the Novel Revision Retreat in 1999 and has written two books on revision.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Miami Herald and the author of the novels Freeman and Before I Forget.  Nonfiction work includes Becoming Dad: Blackmen and the Journey to Fatherhood  and Forward from This Moment: Selected Columns, 1994-2009.  Mr. Pitts is a five- time recipient of the Atlantic City Press Club's National Headliners Award. He has received the American Society of Newspaper Editors award for Commentary Writing and has been named Feature of the Year Columnist by Editor & Publisher.   His nationally syndicated column is published twice weekly.  He lives in Washington, D.C.

Lori Perkins is president of L. Perkins Agency, a New York literary agency, an author, and the publisher of Riverdale Avenue Books, a digital and audio book publisher. She is the editor of Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey, as well as twenty erotica anthologies, including Hungry for Your Love, a zombie romance anthology.  She lives in New York City. 

Karen Russell was named a National Book Foundation "5 under 35" young writer honoree and won the Bard Fiction Prize for her story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.  Her novel,  Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was named one of The New York Times' Ten Best Fiction Books of 2011, and won the New York Public Library's  2012 Young Lions Fiction Award. Her newest work is Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a group of stories.  She is writer in residence at Bard College in Red Hook, New York.




For additional profiles, please visit arkansasliteraryfestival.org.