Artist experience overall.”
The first Memphis Literary Arts Festival will draw fiction and food writers, poets and essayists from New York to New Orleans, Columbus to Atlanta, along with authors and artists from the host city and region.
The event is set for Friday and Saturday in the Edge District in Downtown.
The literary headliner for the opening night of the festival is Kiese Laymon, whose 2013 debut novel “Long Division” — a timetraveling story set in Mississippi — won the Saroyan Prize for International Writing.
Laymon’s 2013 essay collection, “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America,” drew this reaction from writer Roxane Gay: “I was jealous — straight up, green-eyed, how can someone write this ... well, jealous. That passed quickly, though, because Laymon’s writing was too important and too necessary for me to be trifling.”
The year-old Center for Southern Literary Arts in Memphis organized the free-ranging festival, defiantly not a roundup of the usual subjects.
“Our lineup isn’t solely devoted to authors whose books were published this calendar year, like traditional book festivals, but highlights audience and artist experience overall,” Molly Rose Quinn, a co-founder of the CSLA, said by email. It “showcases literary writers alongside reporters, musicians, muralists, and deejays who will be discussing literature, politics, education, food
justice, pop culture, gender, sexuality, region, and class.”
The festival’s guest artists benefit along with the audience, she said.
“Writers like Mychal Denzel Smith and Doreen St. Félix … are coming to Memphis not just for a gig but to see what’s going on down here,” Quinn said. “They’re coming to meet y’all, too, not just the other way around.”
Smith, author of “Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching,” was on The Root’s list of 100 Most Influential African-Americans. St. Félix writes for The New Yorker. Both are based in New York.
Peggy Burch |
Also featured at the opening benefit dinner Friday will be the documentary photographer Andrea Morales, whose work appears in The New York Times and MLK50: Justice Through Journalism; Nashville blues musician Adia Victoria; and Memphis chef Desmond Robinson.
On Saturday, the festival will offer free talks, readings and performances from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at sites in the Edge District, a niche neighborhood near Downtown, followed by an after-party.
Among fiction writers who will appear are Daniel José Older of Brooklyn, winner of an International Latino Book Award for his YA fantasy novel “Shadowshaper”; Maurice Carlos Ruffin of New Orleans, winner of the 2014 Iowa Review Fiction Award; and Ravi Howard, author of the novel “Like Trees, Walking”, a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.
Poets who will speak include Hanif Abdurraqib of Columbus, Ohio, also an essayist and cultural critic; and Sam Sax, whose collection “Madness” won the 2016 National Poetry Series.
Memphis writers on the festival schedule include Alice Bolin, a creative-nonfiction teacher at the University of Memphis, whose “Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession” will be published in June by HarperCollins; and Arthur Flowers, author of “Another Good Loving Blues” and the memoir “Mojo Rising: Confessions of a 21st Century Conjureman.”
The literary magazine Oxford American will host a talk with the writers Crystal Wilkinson and Jamey Hatley, who also is a co-founder of CSLA.
A panel on food writing hosted by the Southern Foodways Alliance will focus, unpredictably, on Beyonce’s Coachella performance and Donald Glover’s TV series “Atlanta.”
Speakers are Osayi Endolyn, a deputy editor of Gravy, which won a James Beard Award for publication of the year; and Ashanté M. Reese, who teaches in the Food Studies Program at Spelman College and is writing a book called “Between a Corner Store and a Safeway: Race, Resilience, and Our Failing Food System.”
A conversation about “Power & Privilege in YA” will feature S. Jae-Jones, author of “Wintersong”; Sarah Nicole Lemon, author of “Valley Girls”; and Kaitlyn Sage Patterson, author of “The Diminished.” Other talks are titled “Solid Gold Soul Writing” and “New Media Journalism in a Changing Memphis,” the latter featuring journalists from MLK50, Chalkbeat Tennessee and High Ground News.
The Literary Arts Festival replaces the Mid-South Book Festival held by Literacy Mid-South from 2014 to 2016. Literacy Mid-South will organize a street fair for vendors during this year’s event.
The guest list is drawn from a broad geographic range, but “what distinguishes this festival from others is Memphis,” Quinn said. “The South is complicated — we’d like to see what it looks like when that complexity is truly celebrated.”
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