Little Grassy Literary Festival set at SIU
Pulitzer Prize finalist and Sumner native Lee Martin is scheduled to appear alongside a handful of fellow distinguished writers at the 10th annual Little Grassy Literary Festival.
The festival is scheduled April 11-13 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
The three-day cultural festival plans to welcome fiction writers Rebecca Makkai and Aimee Hyndman, as well as poets Brendan Galvin, Ruth Awad, Kara van de Graaf and Erin Elizabeth Smith.
Each of the authors is scheduled to give a reading from their published works, to participate in open panel discussions and to interact with those attending the event during a book signing.
The festival is free and open to the public.
All Little Grassy events, with one exception, are scheduled to take place in the Guyon Auditorium in Morris Library on the SIU campus.
Aside from being hosted by SIU, the festival is also organized and run entirely by graduate students in the university’s creative writing MFA program.
Martin is the author of 10 books and frequently uses rural Illinois as a backdrop for his stories.
His reading is scheduled to kick off the festival at 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 11, alongside Awad, who is a recent SIU MFA alum and whose poetry has already garnered numerous publications and awards.
Events on Thursday, April 12, are scheduled to begin with an 11 a.m. reading by Makkai, a Chicago-area native and short-story writer whose latest novel, “The Great Believers,” is due out this summer.
Galvin, the author of 15 books of poetry and a National Book Award finalist, is scheduled to read at 2 p.m. alongside van de Graaf, whose first poetry collection is forthcoming this year.
After a 3 p.m. book signing featuring all of the authors, Galvin, Makkai, Martin and van de Graaf are scheduled to return to the stage at 4 p.m. for a panel discussion entitled “Truth vs. Fiction.”
Then at 7:30 p.m., the festival will hold its only off-campus event, a reading featuring additional SIU MFA alums at Molly’s Pint Brewpub at 12 N. 13th St. in Murphysboro.
Friday’s 10 a.m. reading pairs Hyndman and Smith, two women writers with a penchant for the fantastical.
Hyndman writes high fantasy and will be releasing the third novel in her Clockwork God Chronicles series this summer.
Smith, a Tennessee native and creative director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts, often uses Alice in Wonderland as a persona character in her poetry.
At 11 a.m., the festival is scheduled to conclude with another panel titled “The Writing Life” featuring Awad, Hyndman, Martin and Smith.
The writers will field questions about their creative processes, the challenges inherent to writing, and how to become a professional in the field.
The Little Grassy Literary Festival is an annual nonprofit event which is dedicated to showcasing diverse and impactful voices in contemporary American poetry and prose.