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Mitchell Community College will host the 2014 Doris Betts Spring Writers Festival on Mar. 28 and 29. The festival honors Statesville native Betts, a Southern writer of national prominence and a popular professor of creative writing at UNC Chapel Hill. This year’s festival features the diverse talents of some of the best contemporary Southern writers.
Friday, March 28
Emily Herring Wilson “Friendship Letters: Remembering Doris,” 3 p.m. Wilson, a humanities lecturer and independent scholar, will look back over two decades of friendship with Doris Betts through their exchange of letters, visits, and spirited disagreements. Among her books are Hope and Dignity: Older Black Women of the South; North Carolina Women: Making History, with Margaret Supplee Smith; and No One Gardens Alone: A Life of Elizabeth Lawrence.
N.K. Jemisin, 4 p.m. Jemisin is an author of speculative fiction short stories and novels. Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel and the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award, her work has been nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Award and has been shortlisted for the Crawford, the Gemmell Morningstar, and the Tiptree. Her short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Postscripts, Strange Horizons, Baen’s Universe, Ideomancer, Abyss & Apex, and print anthologies. She is a counseling psychologist and lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY.
Robert Morgan, Friday March 29 7:30 p.m. Morgan is the author of 14 books of poetry, most recently Terroir. He has published nine volumes of fiction, including Gap Creek, a New York Times bestseller, and three nonfiction books, Good Measure: Essays, Interviews, and Notes on Poetry; Boone: A Biography; and Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2010. Born in Hendersonville, he has taught since 1971 at Cornell University.
Saturday, March 29
Writing Workshops, 9 a.m. Registration is required for the free workshops led by the guest writers. Space is limited.
Heather Ross Miller, 11 a.m. Miller is the author of a collection of linked narrative poems titled Lumina: A Town of Voices and Celestial Navigator: Writing Poems with Randall Jarrell. She is a recipient of the Distinguished Alumna Award from UNC Greensboro, the Sir Walter Raleigh Prize for Fiction, the Oscar Arnold Young Prize for Poetry, the Linda Flowers Award for Fiction, and the North Carolina Award for Achievement in Literature and Teaching. Retired from Washington and Lee University, Miller writes and teaches part-time at Pfeiffer University.
Dori Sanders, 1 p.m. Sanders was born in York County, South Carolina on a farm. She still farms the family land, cultivating peaches, watermelons, and vegetables, and helps staff Sanders’ Peach Shed. Her first novel, Clover, is a national best-seller and winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award for Southern literature that enhances social justice. A film version of Clover was released in 1997. Other works include the novel Her Own Place and a cookbook, Dori Sanders’ Country Cooking. She was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.
The festival will conclude with a Writers Panel discussion at 2 p.m.
Participation is free but pre-registration is requested. There is a reception on Friday at 5:30 p.m. at the Statesville Women’s Club at a cost of $15 per person. An optional Networking Luncheon will be held on Saturday at a cost of $8. Advance registration is required.
For a complete schedule and how to register, visit www.mitchellcc.edu, or contact Ben Pressley bpressley@mitchellcc.edu, (704) 878-4349.
The festival is funded in part through a grant from the NC Arts Council Grassroots Arts Program through the Iredell Arts Council with the generous support of the Iredell Friends of the Library and the Mitchell Community College Endowment for Excellence.