The ETSU community was heartbroken to learn of the sudden passing of Dr. Bert C. Bach on August 14, 2023. Dr. Bach was a champion for the arts and especially for making them available to students. We will carry his name and his memory forward with us in all that we do with the Written Word Initiative.
The Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative sponsors programs related to literature and creative writing at ETSU. We place an emphasis on events that benefit students, and we welcome our broader community of readers and writers from around the world.
Black American Writers Series
ft. Sheree Renée Thomas
Wednesday, March 27
1: 40 session in the Reece Museum
7:30 reading in the Bud Frank Theatre
Spring Literary Festival
April 17-18 : ft. Rita Dove, Catherine Pritchard Childress, George Singleton, Sarah
Pinsker, Danielle Byington, and Lydia Copeland Gwyn.
Sheree Renée Thomas
Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and a multiple Hugo Award nominated editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and Mississippi Delta conjure and has earned her fiction fellowships at the Millay Colony of the Arts, Bread Loaf Environmental, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Tennessee Arts Commission, the Lucille Geier Lakes Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at Smith College, and poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts and the Cave Canem Foundation, among others. The author of three fiction collections, including Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books) Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, and Shotgun Lullabies (Aqueduct Press). Sheree is a three-time World Fantasy Award-winning editor for Africa Risen (Tordotcom/MacMillan) and the Dark Matter speculative fiction anthologies (Hachette). She is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy of Science Fiction and associate editor of Obsidian. Her collaboration with artist Janelle Monáe’s “Timebox Altar(ed)” novelet in The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer (HarperVoyager) is a New York Times bestseller, and Sheree is a Marvel writer, including the novel, Black Panther: Panther’s Rage (Titan/Penguin Random House) and her comic book debut, “The World Is Not Ready” featuring the Black Panther and Storm appears in Marvel Voices: Legends #1. She lives in her hometown, Memphis, Tennessee near a mighty river and a pyramid. Visit shereereneethomas.com
Enjoy these photos from our past events: the 2023 Spring Literary Festival, the Women of Appalachia Project "Women Speak" reading, and our 2023 Young Writers' Workshop. Follow the links to read more about these various projects and partnerships.
Our 2024 Spring Literary Schedule is live! Start planning your trip now and reading up on our visiting writers and our keynote speaker, Rita Dove.
Founded in 2015, this ETSU initiative has helped to sponsor programs such as the Spring Literary Festival, the Fall Residency Readings, 3 Emerging Writers Events, the Young Writers' Workshop, and other partnership events over the past seven years.
Our history:
In September 2015, Dr. Bert C. Bach requested a meeting with English professor and Poet-in-Residence, Dr. Jesse Graves to discuss what kinds of support would most benefit students of writing at ETSU. Planning for events began immediately, resulting in the very first Spring Literary Festival the following semester in April 2016. The program has hosted some remarkable events through the first six years of the program, most that we would never have dreamed of without the BCB Initiative. We hosted US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning Kingsport, TN native Charles Wright in October 2017; future US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo in April 2018; Jefferson Award-winning novelist Silas House in April 2019, along with many other celebrated authors in those early years. The BCB has hosted dozens of writers since 2016, with many hundreds of students and community members in attendance, and has developed meaningful partnerships with organizations on campus and beyond. What began with Dr. Bach's question, "What do our writing students need?" has resulted in several ongoing programs, such as the annual Spring Literary Festival, Fall Residency, and 3 Emerging Writers series, alongside new partnerships like the Black American Writers' Series, the Young Writers' Workshop, and a continuing TEDxETSU license for the Creative Writing Society.