2025 festival

At Blue Mountain Christian University, April 3-5, 2025

the competition

Eligibility, rules, and how to enter the undergraduate writing competition (deadline: December 6, 2024)

membership benefits

Join us for the 2025 Southern Literary Festival

Keynote Speaker

Please share!

Breakout Session

Don’t Fade on Me: on Writing & Publishing Novels

Presented by William Boyle

Friday, April 5
9-10:15 a.m.
Room 326

Photo: Katie Farrell Boyle

William Boyle

William Boyle is the author of eight works of fiction set in the southern Brooklyn neighborhood where he was born and raised: Gravesend, which was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France and shortlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger in the UK; Death Don’t Have No Mercy, a story collection; Everything Is Broken, published initially in France and subsequently serialized in Southwest Review; The Lonely Witness, which was nominated for the Hammett Prize and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière; A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, winner of the Prix Transfuge du meilleur polar étranger in France and an Amazon Best Book of 2019; City of Margins, a Washington Post Best Thriller and Mystery Book of 2020; Shoot the Moonlight Out, listed by CrimeReads as one of the ten best noir novels of 2021 and nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 2023; and, coming in 2025, Saint of the Narrows Street. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi.