A dozen Harding students will be attending the Southern Literary Festival at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tenn. , from March 29 through 31.
The Southern Literary Festival is a 75-year-old organization focused on celebrating the arts and encouraging college writers by sponsoring a region-wide Student Literary Competition, according to a letter from the festival directors. The festival also offers a variety of workshops with professional writers. This year’s speakers include two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Tina Howe, director of the Creative Writing Program at Vanderbilt Mark Jarman, five-time Eisner Award winner Eric Powell and author of the book “Fishboy” Mark Richard.
Associate Professor of English Terry Engel is one of the professors going to Nashville for the festival. Engel said approximately 11 or 12 Harding students, most of whom are English majors, will attend the event.
Engel said this will be his first time attending the Southern Literary Festival, but he has been to many creative writing workshops and literary festivals before and has found attending such events to be a great opportunity for students to identify with other writers.
“It encourages a student to think of him- or herself as a writer, rather than a student,” Engel said. “As writers we often toil away in privacy writing our stories and poems without a real sense of audience. When we attend festivals we are identifying ourselves as writers among other writers, and I think that change in perception helps us to take ourselves more seriously.”
A major part of the festival is the Student Literary Competition, which drew in applicants from more than 40 Southern universities this year, according to Engel. Junior Barrett Smith said he received an honorable mention in the poetry category.
Smith said he was not aware that he received an honorable mention until a professor announced it in one of his classes, but he said he was thrilled by the news.
“Having my work compete and place against several other universities is really validating,” Smith said. “Competition for creative writers is a lot tougher outside of Arkansas, where the arts aren’t very emphasized, so being recognized on a larger scale is a huge honor.”
Junior Josh Goslowsky said that aside from meeting other Southern student writers, he looks forward to speaking with writing professionals and learning about how they do what they do and how they got started.
As for the location, Goslowsky said he thinks students will find inspiration in this year’s setting for the festival.
“Being from the Nashville area, I see it as kind of the Vatican of the South,” Goslowsky said. “[It] is a beautiful city and it has so much inspiration. It seems like any area you go in Nashville, you’re going to find little sects, little groups of culture. Nashville has such a wide variety of Christian culture as well as country music, blues and jazz … there’s beautiful things in the city that inspire people to write and inspire people to do great things.”
