'Loved, loved, loved': The Spring Literature Festival

The annual  Spring Literary Festival  was held March 19-20. Featuring some of the most influential voices in contemporary literature, the Lit Fest is eagerly awaited by many in the University community.

The festival is sponsored by the Creative Writing program in the Department of English and is generously funded by the College of Arts & Sciences . All readings and lectures are free and open to the public.

Charlotte Vogelsong, a sophomore majoring in philosophy, attended Lit Fest for the first time this year.

“It's events like this that help reignite the human desire to create and remind us of the power of words,” Vogelsong said. “Witnessing a community of people come together to share this desire was lovely.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan, best known for “ A Visit from the Goon Squad ” (2010) and “ The Candy House ” (2022), presented a lecture and reading. Egan shared details about her writing process and spoke about the importance of reading literature, calling it "an act of resistance."

Charlotte Vogelsong, a sophomore majoring in philosophy, attended Lit Fest for the first time this year and said she "loved, loved, loved" Egan's lecture and that it inspired her to return to her own writing practice.

"As someone who is obsessed with dreams and has pondered ways to utilize dreams in my creative life, I was instantly drawn in by Egan's comparison of fiction to collective dreams and accessing our unconscious," Vogelsong said.

Poet Deborah Landau is the author of Soft Targets (2019), which was awarded the Believer Book Award in 2020; The Uses of the Body (2015); and The Last Usable Hour (2011), both Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium (2011), selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry.

Landau performed a reading on the first night of the festival, which Giana Ray, a first-year student majoring in English pre-law attended.

"It was incredible," Ray said. "Her themes of the body and how our thoughts effect the body was amazing. She also had themes of death, which did make me uncomfortable because grasping the concept of death is hard, but I believe that was the point of her poems."

Madeline ffitch is the author of the short story collection Valparaiso, Round the Horn and the novel Stay and Fight, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Lamda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Washington State Book Award, the LA Times Book Award, and was the 2023 Ohio Center for the Book pick for the National Book Festival. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Award and her story "Seeing Through Maps" was chosen for the 2024 Best American Short Stories anthology. ffitch presented a reading on the second night of the festival.

Vogelsong said hearing ffitch's reading changed her experience of the work. 

"I got to hear her story, less so how I might have read it in my mind, and more closely to how she might have intended the story to be heard," Vogelsong said.