It is time for the 37th annual Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium this week. We have another great line-up this year, and I will be on it. Since I’m on sabbatical, I also won’t be actively serving as director, though I did line up the authors and have helped out as much as I could in the background, so I still count it as my 18th year directing the symposium. My colleague Kris Lee has been taking on the day-to-day operations as acting director since August, though.
As you can see on the flyer, our keynote writer is Alabama’s poet laureate, Ashley M. Jones, who will read from her fabulous new collection Lullaby for the Grieving. Our theme is “Secrets and Revelations: ‘A Dark Thread Running Through My Story,'” which is inspired by Eudora Welty’s novel Losing Battles. The quote is said by the character Miss Gloria, who as an orphan has many unanswered questions about her heritage, themes that Jones takes up in her own way in her poems, mourning the loss of her father and also looking to her ancestors and community.
Other poets include Kathleen Driskell, Olivia Clare Friedman, myself, and Samyak Shertok. We will also hear from drea brown, our Welty Prize scholar whose book Conjuring the Haint explores the importance of haunting in the poetics of Black women.
Novelists include Addie E. Citchens and Rickey Fayne, and Robert Busby and Carrie R. Moore bring short story collections. And finally, Jordan LaHaye Fontenot and Lauren Rhoades will read from their creative nonfiction. We will also hear from the five Ephemera Prize-wining hich school students on Friday afternoon.
I hope you’ll be able to join us for all or part of the symposium, which is free and open to the public. If not, we’ll also live stream the event on our YouTube channel, where sessions will also be archived. I’m excited to joine this wonderfuld group of writers and to read from Tree Fall with Birdsong on Saturday, Oct. 25, at 9:30am.
Kendall Dunkelberg 