Each week, Literary Arts staff will round up news, events, and more happening in the literary community. Let us know if you have any events or book news to share.
VIRTUAL LITERARY EVENTS
Association for the Study of African American Life and History: 2021 Black History Month Festival
February 1—28
A series of stellar educational events that demonstrate how Black people helped shape the American landscape and were shaped by it, posited through the lens of food, religion, social justice, education, economics, and music arts and their impact on the endurance of Black families.
All We Can Save: A Virtual Reading & Conversation
February 4 | 7:00 p.m. EST / 4:00 p.m. PST
Featuring women leaders who are at the forefront of the climate movement, including Academy of American Poets Chancellor Ellen Bass and Camille T. Dungy, two poet contributors to the anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, and climate leaders Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson.
Moth Pacific Story Slam
February 8 | 7:30 p.m. PST
Prepare a five-minute tale about a love that made you go OUCH. The agony of deferred love! The misery of good love, gone bad! The anguish of one-way love! Bring stories of your heart, kicked to the curb by the people or places or things you love…or used to love. Love that “Hurts So Good” also welcome.
We Didn’t Arrive Here Alone
February 13 | 2:00 pm PST / 5:00 pm EST
a virtual, live-streamed program of readings and discussion among renowned US-based undocumented writers and poets on the topic of mental health. Guest curated and moderated by poet and speaker Yosimar Reyes and featuring Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jose Antonio Vargas, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Windfall Reading Series
February 16 | 6:00 p.m. PST
Join Lane Literary Guild and Eugene Public Library for a livestream of the Windfall Reading Series, a monthly gathering highlighting local and regional writers. This month, writers Susan Leslie Moore and David Bradley read and take questions online.
Writers Worktable: From the Editor’s Desk (Cave Canem)
February 17 | 7:00 pm
Poets and editors Duriel E. Harris (“Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora”) and Ashaki M. Jackson (“The Offing”) discuss their editorial careers, the mission and work of the journals they manage, and working with and advocating for Black writers.
An evening with Sandra and Henry Cisneros, Brandon Hobson, Nathaniel Mackey, and Barbara Tran
February 26 | 8:00 p.m. EST
Please join us for the online launch of Conjunctions:75, Dispatches from Solitude! Hosted by Elliott Bay Book Company, the evening will feature readings (and music!) by Sandra Cisneros and Henry Cisneros, Brandon Hobson, Nathaniel Mackey, and Barbara Tran, and an introduction by editor Bradford Morrow.
Morristown Festival of Books @Home
February 20 & 21
Featuring Kristin Hannah, V.E. Schwab, David Michaelis, and debut memoirist Nadia Owusu.
Moth Mainstage
February 27
Five storytellers take the virtual stage and share a true, personal story from their life: joy and heart, in equal measures. Stories of glory and defeat, taunting fate, laughing in the face of danger, and the moments that forever changed the course.
The Sum of Us
March 2 | 5:00 p.m. PST
Heather McGhee’s specialty is the American economy—and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the financial crisis to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a common root problem: racism. But how did this happen? And is there a way out?
RESOURCES & OPPORTUNITIES FOR WRITERS
Summer Fishtrap 2021 Workshops
Registration Opens February 4
Take a weeklong writing workshop in your favorite genre: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, memoir, short story, or children’s literature. Each workshop is limited to no more than 13 participants, giving you the opportunity to build connections with a world-class instructor and your fellow writers.
Fields Artist Fellowship
Deadline: February 15
The Fields Artist Fellowship aims to support artists who are at a pivotal moment or inflection point in their careers, where the fellowship can provide meaningful impact. Oregon Community Foundation and Oregon Humanities will award four Fields Artist Fellows $100,000 each over a two-year period; along with robust professional development, networking and community building opportunities. In addition, a one-time sum of $10,000 will be awarded to eight finalists.
Oregon Arts Commission Career Opportunity Grant
Deadline: March 4
The Career Opportunity program supports individual Oregon artists by enabling them to take advantage of timely opportunities to enhance their artistic careers. Opportunities that the artist was invited to or otherwise reviewed by peers or industry to receive are especially competitive.
Imagine 2200: Climate fiction for future ancestors
Deadline: April 12
Share your visions of solutions that haven’t even been dreamt up yet. Imagine 2200 draws inspiration from Afrofuturism, as well as Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, disabled, feminist, and queer futures, and the genres of hopepunk and solarpunk. We especially want to see — and share — stories that center climate solutions from the most impacted communities and bring into focus what a truly just, regenerative future could look like.
The 2021 Hudson Prize
Deadline: March 31
Each year Black Lawrence Press will award The Hudson Prize for an unpublished collection of poems or short stories. The prize is open to new, emerging, and established writers. The winner of this contest will receive book publication, a $1,000 cash award, and ten copies of the book.
FOR KIDS/TEENS
Waterson Student Essay Competition
Deadline: May 1, 2021
The student award contest is open to all high school-age students (grades 9-12), 18 years old or younger, who reside in Crook, Deschutes, Harney, Jefferson or Lake County. Public school, private school and home-schooled students are eligible.
Penguin Random House Creative Writing Awards Program in Partnership with We Need Diverse Books
Deadline: March 2, 2021
Calling all high school seniors attending a public high school in the United States! We Need Diverse Books and Penguin Random House are happy to announce that submissions are open for the 2021 Creative Writing Awards, a scholarship program dedicated to furthering the education of students with unique and diverse voices.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Powell’s Black History Month Reading List
2020 was a year of reckoning with the race-based violence and inequality entrenched in every community and institution across America. Don’t let your antiracist education stop with the books you ordered last spring. Explore the ever-expanding list of brilliant fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s books written by Black authors and centering Black life.
Ibram X. Kendi: This Is the Black Renaissance
“We are living in a time when the white gaze remains ever present in American life, but is hardly dominant among today’s assemblage of courageous Black creators. We are living in the time of a new renaissance—what we are calling the Black Renaissance—the third great cultural revival of Black Americans, after the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, after the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s… But if the Harlem Renaissance stirred Black people to see themselves, if the Black Arts Movement stirred Black people to love themselves, then the Black Renaissance is stirring Black people to be themselves. Totally. Unapologetically. Freely.”
Featured image by Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor
