JOHNSON CITY – East Tennessee State University’s Spring Literary Festival will be held virtually on Tuesday and Wednesday, April 20-21.
Four well-known authors are featured workshop speakers during the festival, which is sponsored by the Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative and Department of Literature and Language in ETSU’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Poet and playwright Linda Parsons coordinates “Wordstream,” a weekly radio reading series on Knoxville public radio station WDVX-FM with Stellasue Lee and is the reviews editor at Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel. She has contributed poetry to a number of publications, and her fifth poetry collection, “Candescent,” was published by Iris Press in 2019. She is also the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee, and writes social justice plays for the Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville.
In addition to leading a playwriting workshop during the festival, Parsons will give a poetry reading and audience Q&A during the eighth annual Jack Higgs Memorial Reading on Wednesday, April 21, at 7 p.m. This event is named in memory of a longtime faculty member in English at ETSU who was especially noted for his scholarship in the fields of Appalachian and sports literature.
John McNally, who will lead a fiction writing workshop, is the author or editor of 17 books, including the novel “The Book of Ralph” and “The Promise of Failure: One Writer’s Perspective on Not Succeeding.” A new short story collection, “The Fear of Everything,” was published in the fall of 2020. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and his reviews and essays have appeared in over 100 publications. Recently, he wrote several screenplays for the Norwegian film company Evil Doghouse. McNally teaches as writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Sonja Livingston is the author of four books, including the award-winning “Ghostbread” and her latest, “The Virgin of Prince Street.” She has been honored with a number of fellowships and awards for her writing, which appears widely in anthologies and such outlets as Salon, Creative Nonfiction and LitHub. Livingston is an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and teaches in the postgraduate program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She will lead a creative non-fiction workshop during the festival.
Emily Rosko, who will lead a poetry writing workshop, is the award-winning author of the poetry collections “Weather Inventions,” “Rockery” and “Raw Goods Inventory,” and her poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. In addition, she is the editor of “A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line” and poetry editor for Crazyhorse. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri and is associate professor at the College of Charleston and director of the MFA Creative Writing Program.
Also featured in the Spring Literary Festival are the student winners of The Mockingbird awards, a presentation of new writing from ETSU faculty members Dr. Mark Baumgartner and Danielle Nicole Byington, and a public reading and Q&A with McNally, Rosko and Livingston.
For registration or more information, visit the Department of Literature and Language website at etsu.edu/cas/litlang/ or contact Lydia Carr at carrlm@etsu.edu.