The Festival of Words celebrates another year with three amazing artists and two days of memorable events–live! The festival will take place Friday and Saturday, November 4 and 5. This year the festival features Clemonce Heard, John McNally and Ashley M. Jones. Festival events include creative writing workshops for students and the community, a community stage for open mic, and “Drive-by Poetry” in which youth give dramatic presentations of festival authors’ writings.
The Friday night event features a poetry and musical presentation by all three featured artists On Saturday, Drive-by Poetry performers from the Magnet Academy of Cultural Arts will recite works by the featured authors. There will also be an open mic on the community stage, and multiple creative writing workshops, which are open to the public. More details are forthcoming. For more information, check out festivalofwords.org or contact Martha Garner at (337) 804-2482 or fowmartha@gmail.com.
The Festival of Words is supported in part by the St. Landry Parish Tourism Commission and Southarts.
The Festival of Words appreciates partnerships with Acadiana Open Channel, Acadiana Writing Project, Lyrically Inclined, Nunu’s, St. Landry Parish Schools, and many volunteers and sponsors.
ARTISTS
Clemonce Heard is the winner of the 2020 Anhinga-Robert Dana Poetry Prize selected by Major Jackson. His collection, Tragic City, which investigates the events of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, is forthcoming from Anhinga Press in October of 2021. Heard was a recipient of a 2018-2019 Tulsa Artist Fellowship and was the 2019-2020 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned an BFA in graphic communications from Northwestern State University, and an MFA in creative writing from Oklahoma State University. Heard’s work has appeared or is forthcoming from The Missouri Review, Cimarron Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.
John McNally is author or editor of nineteen books, including the forthcoming thriller The Kingdom of Lost Souls (Mysterious Press, 2023). He is author of three other novels (The Book of Ralph, America’s Report Card, and After the Workshop), three story collections (Troublemakers, Ghosts of Chicago, and The Fear of Everything), a memoir (The Boy Who Really, Really Wanted to Have Sex: The Memoir of a Fat Kid), a YA novel (Lord of the Ralphs), and three books about writing (The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist, Vivid and Continuous: Essays on the Craft of Fiction, and The Promise of Failure: One Writer’s Perspective on Not Succeeding). He has had optioned screenplays (Paramount Pictures), a screenplay in development (Anonymous Content with the producer of Winter’s Bone), a development deal for a series (Bonfire Legend, producer of Bone Tomahawk), and commissioned feature screenplays, treatments, and script doctoring from a prominent Norwegian film studio. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award and the recipient of fellowships from Paramount Pictures (Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project), the University of Iowa (James Michener Award), George Washington University (Jenny McKean Moore Fellowship), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellowship). John began teaching fiction writing in 1989. He has been Writer-in-Residence since 2013.
Ashley M. Jones is Poet Laureate of the state of Alabama (2022-2026). She received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and it won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her second book, dark // thing, won the 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press. Her third collection, REPARATIONS NOW! is forthcoming in Fall 2021 from Hub City Press. She won the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press, and she is the 2019 winner of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Jones is a recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and a 2020 Alabama Author award from the Alabama Library Association. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, board member of the Alabama Writers Cooperative and the Alabama Writers Forum, co-director of PEN Birmingham, and a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Jones is also a member of the Core Faculty at the Converse University Low Residency MFA Program. She recently served as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine.
WHAT: Festival of Words is live 2022!
WHEN: Nov. 4 & 5
WHERE: Grand Coteau at the Thensted Center
CONTACT: Martha Garner, fowmartha@gmail.com or 337-804-2482
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