FEstival Schedule
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Roth Reading Room (402, UTC Library)
Sponsored by CAS
Roth Reading Room (402, UTC Library)
Jamie Quatro is the New York Times Notable author of I Want to Show You More, and of the most recent novel, Two-Step Devil, the winner of the 2024 Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing. Quatro holds an MA in English from the College of William and Mary and an MFA in fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program and lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Roth Reading Room (402, UTC Library)
Open to the public. Book signing to follow.
Roth Reading Room (402, UTC Library)
Friday, April 10
Roth Reading Room (402, UTC Library)
Roth Reading Room (402, UTC Library)
Roth Reading Room (402, UTC Library)
Roth Reading Room (402, UTC Library)
Session 1A
Karen Babine
(Creative Nonfiction)
Close to Home: Writing About Place
In this breakout session, we’ll explore how place shapes our writing. Beginning with the immediate and the local, participants will examine how close attention to everyday surroundings can generate insight, voice, and structure. Through short readings and guided writing prompts, we’ll consider how writing emerges from lived experience in the places we find ourselves—how observation, memory, and environment interact on the page. By starting small, we’ll uncover the richness of place as both subject and method, using it as a foundation for deeper critical and creative engagement. Suitable for all genres.
Library 209
Session 1B
Kris Whorton
(Poetry)
Don’t Write It: Withholding in Poetry
In this 75-minute poetry class, we’ll explore how white space shapes meaning as students are invited to consider how structure and withholding can generate emotional tension. Through close reading of a selection of contemporary poets’ work, we’ll examine how line breaks, stanza breaks, and omission create resonance beyond explicit statement. The session will include up to two generative exercises centering on absence, as we practice restraint, image-driven writing, and deliberate withholding.
Library 205
Session 1C
Paul Luikart
(Fiction)
The Envelope of Stories
In this session we’ll plan to talk about the participatory nature of fiction writing between the reader and writer, what jobs both parties have, how they differ, and what the end goal is for the reader/writer collaboration is or could be. Then we’ll do a generative exercise in which participants will have brief conversations with one another on given broad topics, take notes on their conversations, and produce the beginning of a scene from there.
Work in Current Magazine
Roth Reading Room (402, UTC Library)
Southern Writers’ Room, Library 440
Third Place Winners Reading
Roth Reading Room (402, UTC Library)
Sponsored by the UTC English Department
Roth Reading Room (402, UTC Library)
Session 2A
Alex Quinlan
(Storytelling)
Narrative4: Storytelling as a Catalyst for Community
In this session, participants will learn about the power of story as a vehicle for empathy, connection, and community through direct experience. After a brief presentation on the history and structure of the Narrative4 story exchange, attendees will be invited to participate in an exchange themselves, sharing their stories (and building community) with each other.
Library 209
Session 2B
Edwin Murillo
(Short Stories/Translation)
¿Por qué escribimos? Purposeful Creating in Times of Need
This workshop invites writers to think about how they write, why they write, for whom they write, and what they ultimately seek to achieve through their work.
We will begin our session by reading Elizabeth Acevedo’s Afro-Latina and discussing her use of poetry. Afterwards, we will explore the purposes of our writing. We will engage with all possible motivations, then collaborate with our fellow writers to dialogue about the stories that have shaped us and the forces that compel us to create. Our workshop will include a creative session focused on these ideas, giving participants an opportunity to receive immediate feedback from fellow writers.
Participants should be ready to engage with questions like these: Who needs your story? Why do you write today? What is at stake if you remain silent? Etc. Our session is for anyone who understands that literature is indispensable today and always. We’ll close our session with a reading of Miguel Piñero’s The Book of Genesis According to St. Miguelito.
UTC Faculty page for Edwin Murillo
Library 205
Session 2C
Aaron Quinn, Walnut Street Publishing
How to Start Your Own or Be Part of a Punk Press Collective
Walnut Street Publishing is Chattanooga’s community-based publishing collective. We are raising the bar for art, poetry, and stories by elevating the underrepresented voices of Appalachia.
Southern Writers’ Room, Library 440
Second Place Winners Reading
Roth Reading Room (402, UTC Library)
Session 3A
Andrew Najberg
(Fiction/Horror)
Horror Writing Workshop
In this 75-minute class on writing horror fiction, we’ll discuss the challenges of creating horror in a contemporary landscape and explore how to structure a “frightening” sequence by examining the work of emerging authors and participating in a generative exercise.
Library 209
Session 3C
Jamie Quatro
(Featured Writer)
The Sound Before the Story
A lecture format breakout session including audience participation and samples from other writers’ work.
Roth Reading Room (402, UTC Library)
Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and five novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017), Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection, Now is Not the Time to Panic (Ecco, 2022) and Run for the Hills (Ecco, 2025). His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English & Creative Writing Department at the University of the South.
Derthick 101
Open to the public. Book signing to follow.
Saturday, April 11
Coffee sponsored by Alumni Affairs
Lupton First Floor, 120
Lupton First Floor, 120
Session 4A
Dana Shavin
(Creative Nonfiction)
The Four Horsemen of the Personal Essay
The four things you must get right in your personal essays.
Lupton 392
Session 4B
Christian J. Collier
(Poetry)
What I’m From
We’ll be looking at ways to insert and complicate the things that have made us in our work.
Lupton 391
Session 4C
Matthew Hubbard
(Fiction/YA)
Establishing Voice in Fiction
In this session, we’ll write a scene using only dialogue to help strengthen distinct voices to establish crucial story elements. Good for YA or general fiction.
Lupton 393
Session 4D
Leigh Anne Couch
(Poetry)
Dear Stranger
Fascinated by the power and extreme intimacy of letter-writing–true letters, not the ta-da cleverness of tweets or the clipped expedience of most emails–I often use letters (writing in longhand) to warm up my poetry brain. A true letter is written by one individual to another; it has a purpose and every move in its construction has the reader in mind. The process and form of the epistolary poem encourages the writer to look for common ground, to keep the one-way conversation going until there’s a reply. We will read some ancient and very recent examples of the epistolary poem and try our hand at it. As Aimee Nezhukumatathil says, “I like to think of writing epistles as a writing towards–and attempting to love, or at least recognize–the strangers that live inside each of us.
Lupton 303
Campus Crossroads (near Lupton)
Visiting Writers Reading
Matthew Hubbard, Christian J. Collier, Leigh Anne Couch, Richard Jackson
Roth Reading Room (402, UTC Library)
Open to the public.
