College to Host Writers Festival Oct. 22

Scrawl, the Westminster College student literary arts publication, will sponsor an all-day Writers Festival, Friday, Oct. 22, in the Berlin Lounge of the McKelvey Campus Center. The event is free and open to the public.

Guest speakers will share their work, talk about their writing careers, and conduct workshops for student writers. They include:

David Madden, professor, writer-in-residence, and director of the creative writing program at Louisiana State University, will read at 9:20 a.m. and will conduct a workshop at 12:50 p.m. He is a novelist, poet, literary critic, and playwright. His most recent novels include On the Big Wind and Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War and short story collections The Shadow Knows and The New Orleans of Possibilities. He is the subject of the academic volume David Madden: A Writer for All Genres co-authored by Dr. James Perkins, Westminster College professor of English emeritus.

Michael Pearson, creative writing professor at Old Dominion University, will give a reading at 10:30 a.m. and will conduct a workshop at 3:10 p.m. A travel writer, Pearson's works include Innocents Abroad Too; Shohola Falls (a novel); and Imagined Places: Journeys into Literary America, which was named a New York Times Notable Book for 1992.

Claire Barbetti, who teaches medieval literature, poetry, and composition at Duquesne University, will conduct a workshop at 2 p.m. and read from her work at 4:15 p.m. Her work has appeared in How 2, The Cimmaron Review, and The Drunken Boat. Her work often revolves around the concept of ekphrasis (poetry describing art) and she has recently completed the book Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New Discussion in Interarts Theory.

Copies of each artist's work will be available for purchase at the event and Scrawl will sell T-shirts featuring the festival's theme.

Contact Michelle Moore, Scrawl editor, at mooremc@westminster.edu, or Evann Garrison, Westminster lecturer of English and faculty adviser to Scrawl, at (724) 946-7341 (e-mail garriseg@westminster.edu) for more information.

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