MONTEVALLO—The University of Montevallo will host its 11th Annual Montevallo Literary Festival on Friday, April 12, beginning at 9 a.m., on the 2nd floor of Humanities Hall on the UM campus.
Keynote speaker and master class instructor in poetry will be Robin Behn, who teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Alabama. She also directs the Creative Writing Club for high school writers. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies nationwide, and she is the author of six volumes of poems including The Yellow House, Naked Writing and Horizon Note.
Keynote speaker and master class instructor in prose will be author Jennifer S. Davis, a native Alabamian and graduate of the University of Alabama, who teaches at Louisiana State University. Her first collection of stories, Her Kind of Want (2002), was the winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and her second collection, Our Former Lives in Art, was published by Random House in 2007.
Readings in poetry and prose will be presented throughout the day by guest authors, all with ties to Alabama, who will also participate in a panel discussion that will be open to questions from those in attendance.
Guest authors will include Chantel Acevedo, whose first novel, Love and Ghost Letters, won the Latino International Book Award and was a finalist for the Connecticut Book of the Year. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous publications. Acevedo, who was named a Literature Fellow by the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 2012, is an associate professor of English and Alumni Writer in Residence at Auburn University where she founded the Auburn Writers Conference and edits the Southern Humanities Review.
James Braziel, who teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is the author of the Bantam novels Birmingham, 35 Miles and Snakeskin Road. Weathervane, a chapbook of his poetry, was published by Finishing Line Press. Braziel’s fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of publications, and he has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, the most honored literary project in America.
Award-winning poet Peter Streckfus, whose first book, The Cuckoo, was the 2004 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, is on the faculty of the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in such collections as The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, The Seattle Review and The New Republic.
Adam Vines, assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has published his work in Poetry, North American Review, New Orleans Review and The Literary Review, among others. His collection of poetry, The Coal Life, was a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize and was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2012. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference where he is on staff during the summers. He is editor of Birmingham Poetry Review.
The event will conclude with a barbecue dinner and live music.
For further information, contact MLF co-directors Jim Murphy or Bryn Chancellor at 205-665-6420 or at http://www.montevallo.edu/