Lit Fest 2025

This panel of writers and editors will share their screening process for determining what manuscripts make it into publication or the final rounds of a contest. We’ll share some suggestions for what to do (and what not to do) to make your work stand out and get the green light. Panelists include Jenny Shank, who served as a screener judge for this year’s Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Michelle Dotter, the publisher of Dzanc Press, and authors Kristin Koval and Steven Dunn.

In this seminar, we’ll work through the process of building a character (or characters) who can serve as a catalyst for a larger narrative, propelling the story forward. From navigating backstory to placing characters in scene, we’ll focus on getting protagonists and antagonists out of our heads and onto the page through a series of writing exercises, discussion of example texts, and optional sharing.
This is the livestream version of this class, if you would like to attend in person, click here.

The journalist Michael Pollan asserts that every piece of nonfiction needs a “laundry line”: a main conceptual through-line that is strong yet flexible enough to hold the various vignettes and reflections that make up the piece. The same is true for fiction: even with plot to guide us, fiction writers need to think about how to balance the narration of physical events with psychological ones, how to weave backstory with present action. This class will offer writers a new vocabulary for articulating and experimenting with structure through lecture, discussion, and a writing exercise.

Humans are symbolic beings. We create symbols, we use them, we misuse them. In this class, we’ll first take a deep dive into the symbolic and the metaphorical in our everyday lives. We’ll analyze several examples of literary nonfiction that use the same devices fiction writers employ to layer meaning. We’ll talk about ways nonfiction writers can both deepen and complicate their own narratives and, in the process, understand the universalities embedded in our experiences.

In order for your memoir to work, you need to be a character with flaws, with conflict, with desires—in short, with very human traits. This workshop explores how to explore and write your “Self” on the page in a way that allows the reader to know you, to like you, and go along for the ride.

Lament can be elegy or protest, memoir or lyric outpouring. This craft workshop will explore this fertile and necessary genre, offering examples and prompts to encourage writers to articulate their own lament whether it be personal, political, environmental, or spiritual.

Hear your favorite visiting author perform their recent works. Shop at the Lit Fest pop-up bookstore operated by The Bookies and get your book signed afterward.