University of Montevallo's Literary Festival featuring authors, poets is ...

MONTEVALLO, Alabama -- The University of Montevallo's 11th annual Montevallo Literary Festival is starting at 9 a.m. on Friday at Comer Hall's second floor on the institution's campus.

Readings in poetry and prose will happen throughout the day by guest authors with ties to Alabama. They will also participate in a panel discussion that will be open to questions from audience members.

Keynote speakers include Robin Behn, master class instructor in poetry, and Jennifer S. Davis, master class instructor in prose.

Behn teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at the University of Alabama. She also directs the Creative Writing Club for high school writers.

Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies nationwide, and she is the author of six volumes of poems including "The Yellow House," "Naked Writing" and "Horizon Note."

Davis is a native Alabamian and graduate of the University of Alabama who teaches at Louisiana State University. Her first collection of stories, "Her Kind of Want" (2002), was the winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and her second collection, "Our Former Lives in Art," was published by Random House in 2007.

Guest authors include Chantel Acevedo, a literature fellow by the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 2012 who is an associate professor of English and alumni writer in residence at Auburn University, where she founded the Auburn Writers Conference and edits the Southern Humanities Review.

Acevedo's first novel, "Love and Ghost Letters," won the Latino International Book Award and was a finalist for the Connecticut Book of the Year. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous publications.

Also participating is James Braziel, who teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and is the author of the Bantam novels "Birmingham, 35 Miles" and "Snakeskin Road." Braziel's fiction and poetry have appeared in various publications, and he has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, an honored literary project.

Award-winning poet Peter Streckfus is on the faculty of the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama. His first book, "The Cuckoo," was the 2004 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition.

Adam Vines is an assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has published his work in Poetry, North American Review, New Orleans Review and The Literary Review. His collection of poetry, "The Coal Life," was a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize and was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2012.

Vines was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, where he is on staff during the summers. He is editor of Birmingham Poetry Review.

The festival will conclude with a barbecue dinner and live music.

For more information, contact MLF co-directors Jim Murphy or Bryn Chancellor at (205) 665-6420 or at www.montevallo.edu/english/mlf/.

For more stories about Montevallo, click here.

Source: http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2013/04/university_of_montevallos_lite.html

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