Spring Literary Festival (Contributed/ETSU)

The Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative hosted its annual spring Literary Festival from April 22 to 24. It included several events and panels, featuring visiting authors and authors from ETSU’s faculty and student bodies.

“The Spring Literary Festival is a couple of days of craft talks, lectures, readings, generative spaces for people to come write and get some prompts, hear from visiting authors and just a way for us to bring creative writing to campus for a condensed amount of time,” said Lacy Snapp, the assistant director of the Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative.

“It’s also to celebrate creative writing and get people together. Right now we have fiction, nonfiction and poetry, but in the past we’ve had drama and film, so we’re always trying to vary that as well with which genres we’re bringing to campus, to expose students to many different options. It’s really important just to get people writing and to build literary communities.”

The festival began with a kickoff event on Tuesday evening that celebrated the recent book launch by ETSU faculty member Michael Cody. His novel, “Streets of Nashville,” came out on April 15. The book launch took place in downtown Johnson City at The Generalist and included a reading, Q&A and book signing.

On-campus events began at the Reece Museum at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, starting with a welcome event that included readings by the student Mockingbird winners. The 2024-25 Mockingbird editors, Erika Perez Cortazar and Briana Presley, also passed the torch to the new editors for the upcoming school year.

“This is always a really exciting thing because as much as we want to celebrate writers who are farther along in their journeys, it’s always nice to start with this as a way to celebrate student writing here at ETSU,” said Snapp.

The New Writing From ETSU panel took place at 11:30 a.m. and featured readings by Amy Wright and Megan Krupa. Amy Wright is ETSU’s new full-time creative nonfiction faculty member and has published multiple poetry books and her nonfiction debut, “Paper Concerts.” Megan Krupa is an ETSU alumna and now works as an assistant professor at ETSU. She has also published her poetry chapbook, “Heirloom.”

Poetry Writing and Fiction Writing workshops took place in the afternoon, starting at 1:40 p.m., with visiting writers Gaylord Brewer and Carter Sickels, in their respective genres. Both events featured a craft talk. They held time for attendees to write about a given prompt within that genre and have an opportunity to share their writing.

Gaylord Brewer, the visiting author for the poetry genre, has published 17 books across a variety of genres. His next poetry book, “Negotiable Gods,” was the 2024 winner of High Frequency Press’s Morse Code Poetry Prize and will be coming out in 2026.

Carter Sickels, the visiting author for the fiction genre, has published two novels as well as short stories and essays across many different literary publications. His debut novel, “The Evening Hour,” was adapted into a movie in 2020, while his second novel, “The Prettiest Star,” won multiple awards and recognitions.

Thursday at 10:15 a.m. was a Public Reading and Q&A event featuring all three of the visiting authors: Gaylord Brewer, Carter Sickels and Erika Howsare.

The Nonfiction Writing workshop took place Thursday at 1:20 p.m., following a similar format as the two previous genre events. It featured visiting author Erika Howsare. Her first nonfiction book, “The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors,” came out in 2024. She has also published two poetry books and several reviews and essays throughout various literary publications.

At 3 p.m. was a Conversation with Helena María Viramontes, the keynote speaker for the Literary Festival. This included a panel discussion with two faculty members at ETSU, Jesse Graves and Felipe Fiuza.

Helena María Viramontes has published two novels, “Under the Feet of Jesus” and “Their Dogs Came With Them.” She has also written several short stories and has published her short story collection, “The Moths and Other Stories.” She has received several awards and honors and is currently working on completing her next novel.

The 11th annual Jack Higgins Memorial Reading took place at 7 p.m. in the East Tennessee Room, featuring readings from Helena María Viramontes.

“My hope would be that people can walk away having started one new thing, whether that be in any of the genres or having a new idea, but just to walk away and be inspired to write,” said Snapp.

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