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Annual Alabama Events

February 17-19, 2012

Sponsored by the Hoover Public Library, Southern Voices seeks to increase Hoover's cultural importance by providing book lovers with an opportunity to meet and mingle with the authors they love. See Web site for more information.

April 13, 2012

Please mark your calendars for the 10th annual Montevallo Literary Festival, a celebration of creative writing hosted by the University of Montevallo. The 2012 festival will be held Friday, April 13, on the UM campus. This friendly, relaxed festival is dedicated to bringing literary writers and readers together on a personal scale. The festival features readings by all invited writers, book signings, receptions, and master classes in poetry and prose, capped by a dinner with live music. This year’s lineup of creative writers includes master-class leaders Joy Castro (prose) and James Kimbrell (poetry), plus Erica Dawson, Michael F. Smith, and Ralph Voss.

Read more about these authors http://www.montevallo.edu/english/MLF/, where registration information and schedules also will be available soon. Check in also at our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/MontevalloLiteraryFestival

April 21, 2012

The seventh annual Alabama Book Festival will be held in historic downtown Montgomery at Old Alabama Town on April 21, 2012, from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. The free public event is the state's premier book festival-with more than 4,000 people from around the state converging in the capital to meet with and hear from their favorite authors and scholars. See Web site for more information.

April 26-28, 2012

The Alabama Center for Literary Arts presents the 2012 Alabama Writers Symposium at Alabama Southern Community College in Monroeville, AL. Readers, writers, scholars, and the recipient of the 2012 Harper Lee Award for Alabama's Distinguished Writer of the Year and the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Alabama's Distinguished Scholar of the Year. See Web site for more information.

July 20-22, 2012

The Alabama Writers' Conclave was organized in 1923 and has been in continuing existence since. Through the years, the Conclave has moved its conferences around the state to provide writers everywhere better access to its resources. The Conclave is responsible for nominating, for the governor’s appointment, Alabama's Poet Laureate, a post currently filled by Sue Brannan Walker. Conclave members mostly hail from Alabama, although many states are represented. Members include fiction and non-fiction writers, novelists and short story writers, poets, writers of business and scientific works, freelance journalists, romance writers, publishers, patrons, and teachers. See Web site for more information.

November 12, 2011

The Slash Pine Poetry Festival brings over forty national and regional poets together for a two-day extravaganza of poetry. The festival highlights the public and democratic nature of creative work, refusing to privilege one form or aesthetic over another, and presenting diverse voices in non-traditional, communally-accessible spaces. The festival itself spreads widely across a range of venues, emphasizing that art is intimately connected to place. We also have hosted other events such as undergraduate poetry exchanges, poetry hikes, and other marathon readings in Denver and Birmingham. This years festival will take place in Tuscaloosa, AL. See Web site for more information.

October 7-8, 2011

Offering instruction, practice, perspective, and community in a relaxed setting, AWC features small-group workshops, panel discussions, and readings from emerging and established authors. This year’s theme, “Myth, Memory, and the Haunted Muse,” asks participants to consider the ways that writers use the idea of "the haunted" in their work—either literally or figuratively, as in the memories, histories, people, and places that haunt, and hence propel, characters. See Web site for more information.

Sept. 10, 2011

Limestone Dust is a thriving gathering of poets from all over the state and beyond. Its purpose is to celebrate the art of poetry. Poets come together to showcase their art, to hear other poets, and to hone their craft. See Web site for more information

February 19, 2011

The Jacksonville State University Department of English is pleased to present "I Ain't Been Much Farther Than My Mailbox," the fifteenth On the Brink Conference, on Saturday, February 19 at Leone Cole Auditorium. On the Brink is designed as a provocative and entertaining gathering of Southern writers and readers. The conference offers a forum for emerging writers as they explore the Southern experience through our past, present and future. The conference will bring together writers in a range of genres. The writers attending the conference will read from their works and discuss their reasons for working in their chosen genre, as well as respond to questions from the audience. See Web site for more information.