2021 Virtual Literary Festival

Mesha Maren

Mesha Maren, the author of Sugar Run, reads from and talks about her work as part of the 19th annual Spring Literary Festival at Western Carolina University.

Kristen Radtke

A live reading and conversation with Kristen Radtke, the author of the graphic nonfiction book Imagine Wanting Only This (2017), and the forthcoming books Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (July 2021), for which she received a 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, and Terrible Men, a graphic novel, all from Pantheon. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, The Guardian, GQ, Vogue, NPR, and many other places.

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips

A live reading and conversation with Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, author of the short story collection Sleepovers, which won the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, was also longlisted for The Story Prize and is forthcoming in Italian. Ashleigh's stories have appeared in The Paris Review, The Oxford American, and others. Her essays have appeared in Our State and Lit Hub. She teaches fiction at West Virginia Wesleyan College's low residency MFA and is a Southern editor for Joyland Magazine.

Camille T. Dungy

Poet and editor Camille T. Dungy earned a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Camille T. Dungy’s debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019.

Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Jessica Jacobs and Mentees

Chantel Acevedo

Called "a master storyteller" by Kirkus Reviews, Chantel Acevedo is the author of the novels Love and Ghost Letters, A Falling Star, The Distant Marvels, which was a finalist for the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and, The Living Infinite, hailed by Booklist as a "vivid and enthralling tale of love and redemption." She is a Professor of English at the University of Miami, where she directs the MFA program.

Jeff Sharlet

Jeff Sharlet, an award-winning literary journalist and author of seven books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Family, which is also a Netflix documentary series. His most recent book, This Brilliant Darkness, the New York Times calls “gorgeous.” He is a contributing editor at Harper’s and Rolling Stone and the Director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

Edwidge Danticat

Join us for the final event of the 2021 Spring Literary Festival, a night with the award-winning writer Edwidge Danticat. Danticat is the author of many books, most recently Everything Inside, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and The Story Prize. In addition to her fiction, she has written books for children and the memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, a finalist for the National Book Award.