From April 20-21, ETSU’s Department of Literature and Language hosted their sixth annual Spring Literary Festival.

The two-day festival included guest authors Emily Rosko, John McNally, Sonja Livingston and Linda Parsons, who covered a wide variety of genres such as poetry, creative nonfiction, playwriting and fiction. The festival was sponsored by the Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative.

ETSU’s Department of Literature and Language Spring Literary Festival poster. (Contributed/ETSU)

“For the literary festival we want the workshops, presentations and student and community interaction to be a big part of it,” said Jesse Graves, literature and language professor and director of Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative. “It’s really important that the people who come here for the festival are not only great writers, but great teachers.”

The first day of the Spring Literary Festival had a spotlight on the students who won The Mockingbird Awards, as well as new writers from ETSU. It also had two workshops that covered fiction writing and playwriting with special guests McNally and Parsons, respectively.

The second day of the festival included a public reading and Q&A with all the guest authors, followed by creative nonfiction and poetry workshops. The festival ended with the eighth annual Jack Higgs memorial reading and a poetry reading and Q&A by Parsons.

All the workshops included a lot of writing exercises, where participants had the option to share. Part of Livingston’s creative nonfiction workshop hit upon experiences that writers could pull ideas from. Livingston’s creative non-fiction workshop especially highlighted prompts and exercises to help writers find ideas. Participants then had an opportunity to share, one of them being a 71-year-old beginning writer.

“Just let yourself write,” Livingston said. “Nonfiction writing isn’t what happened to you, its what you made of it.”

The ETSU Literature and Language Department will partner with Humanities Tennessee this summer to host the annual Young Writers’ Workshops, which focus on helping high school students foster their love of writing by providing insight from their peers as well as professional authors.

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