Lex Allen Literary Festival

  9:30 – check-in and refreshments, 2nd floor lobby

10:30 – reading by Crystal Wilkinson

11:30 – poetry panel discussing student-submitted work

12:45 – luncheon, Moody Dining Hall (pay at the door)

  2:00 – reading by Li-Young Lee

  3:15 – reading by Barbara Hurd

  4:00 – reception, 2nd floor lobby

Barbara Hurd’s books include<em> Listening to the Savage: River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies</em>; <em>Tidal Rhythms: Change and Resilience at the Edge of the Sea </em>(with photographer Stephen Strom);<em> Stepping Into the Same River Twice</em> (with artist Patricia Hilton); and <em>Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains</em>. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals including <em>Best American Essays</em>, <em>The Georgia Review</em>, and<em> The Yale Review</em>. She is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, the NEA Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, the Sierra Club’s National Nature Writing Award, three Pushcart Prizes, and five Maryland State Arts Council Awards.

Li-Young Lee is the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins for spring 2017. He is the author of <em>Behind My Eyes, Book of My Nights</em>, which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award;<em> The City in Which I Love You</em>, which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and<em> Rose</em>, which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. His other work includes <em>The Winged Seed: A Remembrance</em>, a memoir that received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Other accolades include a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, and three Pushcart Prizes.

Crystal Wilkinson, whose latest novel is <em>Birds of Opulence</em>, has been applauded for her efforts to promote the creative work of African Americans in Appalachia. She has been nominated for both the Orange Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and has been recognized by the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts. She is also a recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature. <em>Water Street </em>and <em>Blackberries, Blackberries </em>are among her other works. Wilkinson’s short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the Appalachian anthology <em>Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean</em>.

Funding provided by the John Alexander and Mary Josephine Haynes Allen Literary Endowment, the Dee Hull Everist Visiting Speaker Series, and the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence Fund.