Lit Fest 2025

Discussions in the West around diversity in the arts often focus on the identities of characters and creators. However, true diversity is about more than just plopping different faces into stories that are 100 percent Western in spirit; it can―and should―encompass diverse structures, themes, and values. The program explores how storytelling staples in the West, such as the three-act structure and themes of empowerment and change, are far from universal. It introduces viewers to the East Asian four-act story structure and explains how Eastern value systems such as collectivism can dictate form.

Denis Johnson said, “The stories of the fallen world lay inside us. That’s the interesting stuff.” At our best, we all write about that slice of experience and knowledge that haunts and obsesses us. Does it have to be dark or fallen? No. But it has to be true to the deepest corners of your consciousness. In this seminar, we’ll look at what you write about and why. We’ll find the richest avenues for you to pursue, to set you off from the pack.

You've been polishing your writing and you're ready to submit it to literary journals, but just how do you do that? In this seminar, we'll learn about many of the journals waiting for your work. We'll discuss cover letters, tracking your submissions, useful websites, how to gauge whether you received a "good" rejection, and how to know when to keep submitting a piece, pull it for revisions, or put it in the recycle pile. By the end of this seminar, you'll be armed with a thick-anti-rejection hide and a list of journals to submit your work to.

In After Lorca, Jack Spicer writes (in a “letter” to the dead Federico Garcia Lorca), “A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.” In “The Spiral Jetty,” Robert Smithson writes that “size determines an object, but scale determines art.” How do we create and experience the life and afterlife (and perhaps even the half-life) of the “infinitely small”? How does a minimal poem negotiate a relationship between size and scale? In this discussion-based seminar, we'll explore how attention and comprehension expand, contract, and contort as we read and write toward the limits of expression.

Your style is yours alone. Readers will return to your writing again and again because they like the way you shape consciousness on the page. In this seminar, we’ll dig into your style, decide on what sets you apart, then hone your unique voice. You’ll come away with a clear sense of your true self on the page.

Writing a poem is not unlike walking down a hallway, passing many doors, almost always too quickly. Which ones might we stop and open? How exactly do we do open these doors? When we write, we are making constant choices, intuitive and conscious. In this seminar, we’ll talk about how to slow down and understand our choices in poems, and by extension any piece of writing. This way we can vastly expand our writing, and continually renew our sense of exploration and discovery. We can also become better readers. We’ll look at poems by others, and gather specific techniques of expansion and discovery. Bring a poem of yours that you know is not yet right, and if we have time, we’ll practice slowing down together.

Help us celebrate the exceptional talent among this year’s Lit Fest Fellowship finalists and winners. Happy hour beverages and snacks available.

Our lineup so far:

Fellowship for Emerging Writers
Poetry: Sydney Mayes (selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips)
Fiction: Mika Taylor (selected by Megha Majumdar)
Nonfiction: T Abeyta (selected by Mark Sundeen)

Veteran Writing Awardees (selected by Benjamin Hertwig):
Enrique Gautier
Matt Gallagher

LARRK Fellowship Winners:
Shelby Pinkham
Iggy Shuler

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.

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.