Agnes Scott College English Department

Nikky Finney, Writers’ Festival guest in 2019, is a national treasure and bringer of truth & light. An important read.

New post on the Writers' Festival site! We are getting excited!

Happy Thursday! What is your favorite Writers’ Festival moment? Was it seeing a particular writer? Reading the Writers’ Festival Magazine? As we celebrate the Festival’s 50th Anniversary, we would love to know!Happy Thursday! What is your favorite Writers’ Festival moment? Was it seeing a particular writer? Reading the Writers’ Festival Magazine? As we celebrate the Festival’s 50th Anniversary, we would love to know!

Agnes #LeadingEverywhere! #14

Congratulations, Professor Moon! Making beauty from the impossible, once again!

Our fantastic Professor Moon, making the world a better place. Thank you!

Congratulations to Joy Harjo, appointed for a rare third term as Poet Laureate! And, check out Harjo's laureate project "Living Nations, Living Words," an interactive digital map that collects biographies and recordings from dozens of contemporary Native poets across the country. (https://loc.gov//poet-laureat/living-nations-living-words/)

Check out last year’s Kirk Writer-in-Residence, William Boyle, nabbing the top spot in this list of 2020’s best mystery & thriller books! Happy reading!

Happening now! Join ASC’s Charlotte Artese, Robert Meyer-Lee, and Jim Diedrick at the Decatur Book Festival!

ASC’s Writers’ Festival contest finalists, at the Decatur Book Festival, right now! They are amazing!!

Please send me an email expressing your interest in participating at [email protected] by September 10, 2020. Call for participation below: Call for Partic...ipation: Poetry Reading 100 Thousand Poets for Change: Poetry Reading Sunday, September 27 | 11:00AM to 4:00PM (in three 75-minute sessions with breaks) Zoom Reading/Webinar 100 Thousand Poets for Change is celebrating this year its 10th Anniversary. In this time, well over 6000 readings have been organized under its sponsorship across the world. With backing from the English Department, Agnes Scott College has been a part of this initiative the last six years, and this annual reading has now become a part of its regular calendar of events. It is time now to send out a call for this year’s reading. The event is set for Sunday, September 27, on Zoom and will be conducted in three sessions of 75 minutes each, with breaks of 15-20 minutes between each session. The reading will be recorded and, as in the past, the recording will become part of the 100 Thousand Poets for Change archives, curated by the founders of this movement Michael Rothenberg and Terri Carrion, and housed at the Stanford University library in California. All those who are interested are welcome to participate by volunteering to read a poem or two. You may read your own work or a poem you love, in any language you choose, provided you offer a translation of the poem in English if it is originally in another language. Justice, Sustainability, and Peace remain the overarching themes of the reading, goals toward which the organization believes poetry and poets contribute in a notable way. This year, however, I would like us also to consider a theme that arises out of our transformed lives and anxieties over these past few unsettling months--how maladies that threaten or afflict us change the way we view ourselves and our relationship to the world. The theme includes both the effects of the global pandemic on our individual and collective assumptions about and expectations from a meaningful life in the world we inhabit as well as the glaring spotlighting of systemic racial injustice in our society that is forcing us to confront the inequities that surround us. But, if the virus has made us aware of the invisible perils that lie around us, ever threatening to upend our lives, and protests against racism have brought us face to face with another kind of sickness the symptoms of which are all around us but to which a number of us may have been mostly blind, the times may also have brought us greater awareness of people facing many other kinds of life-threatening frailties or afflictions in their individual capacity--the hazards of old age and the plight of old people in nursing homes, for one, and those fighting grievous medical conditions, cancer, Alzheimer’s, Aids, dementia, diabetes, and the like. Many of us are already responding to the crisis we face as individuals and as a society in our own special ways, so this rough map of our adversities is not to be viewed as a charge for presenting any particular kind of poetry at the event. Every participant is free to contribute whatever they believe best fits what to their mind represents the transformative power of poetry, the richness, joy, healing, comfort, and awareness it brings to our lives and in the lives of those who participate by listening, reading, and appreciating it. I share my brief thoughts in this call for participation without any conditions or expectations attached. Please send me an email expressing your interest in participating at [email protected] by September 10, 2020. Once I have your responses and the list of participating poets is finalized, I will send out a Zoom invitation to all the participants. The reading will be offered as a Webinar so that we have an audience outside the participants as well.