Lit Fest 2025

Need an author website but don't know where to start? This seminar will guide you through designing and launching an effective author website. Using an in-depth bespoke questionnaire, you’ll clarify your unique branding and style to create a site that truly resonates with readers. From choosing the right platform to building user-friendly design and crafting engaging content, this session is packed with practical tips and hands-on advice to bring your digital presence to life. Perfect for authors at any stage who want a polished, professional online home.

You believe 100% in your book. You've polished your manuscript, had beta readers, attended workshops, hired an editor, and queried agents to no avail. You want your book in print, but you've given up on "big" book publishing. Come explore other options as former literary agent Shana Kelly interviews authors who found success with small presses, self-publishing, and the hybrid model. How did they find publishers? What were the pros and cons? What was the cost? How about sales? Join these authors as they reveal the highs and the lows of publishing outside the Big Five.

You believe 100% in your book. You've polished your manuscript, had beta readers, attended workshops, hired an editor, and queried agents to no avail. You want your book in print, but you've given up on "big" book publishing. Come explore other options as former literary agent Shana Kelly interviews authors who found success with small presses, self-publishing, and the hybrid model. How did they find publishers? What were the pros and cons? What was the cost? How about sales? Join these authors as they reveal the highs and the lows of publishing outside the Big Five.

What does it mean to be in conversation with our local landscapes in our writing? Part experiential learning, part creative practice, SITE//VISIT provides a space to learn about native plants and local ecology and translate embodied experience onto the page through play and improvisation. We’ll draw from the practices and work of artists and writers such as Cecilia Vicuna, CA Conrad, Jake Skeets, and others.

With jobs and family/personal responsibilities, sustaining a writing practice seems harder these days than ever before. We struggle to find the time and energy to find our way into our creative space. This course will offer prompts and habit-building techniques to help us sustain our writing practices, whether to exercise our muscles or to make it through long-term projects.

Most of us aren't able to support ourselves materially through what we would consider our “calling” (an idea that doesn’t recognize the inequities and issues of access shaped by capitalism, racism, and ableism). Lacking a single “vocation,” we may cobble together our livelihood through many sources. Beyond the fantasy of a consistent work/life balance, this lecture considers the root of vocation: both the labor of writing and the “calling out.” Through what forms and technologies are we able to be heard?

This is a talk about craft, its embedded politics, and the production of a poet in the US.