Great writers, readers, fans and friends will gather on three Wednesday nights this October for the Fall Literary Festival at the University of South Carolina. Now in its twenty-second year, the festival continues to bring unique and inspiring writing voices to campus.
This year, the virtual festival welcomes children’s and young adult book author Jacqueline Woodson, poet Robyn Schiff and Aminatta Forna, novelist and memoirist. The festival events begin at 7 p.m. on three consecutive Wednesdays in October.
Forna, our final guest, will read Wednesday, Oct. 27.
Aminatta Forna is the author of four novels — Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love, and Ancestor Stones — and the critically acclaimed memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water. Her fiction has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award and the PEN Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and has been short-listed for the Neustadt Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the IMPAC Award, and the Warwick Prize. Her work has also been nominated for the European Prize for Fiction. Forna is currently a Lannan Visiting Chair at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
The Fall Literary Festival is a partnership between University Libraries and the Department of English, supported by the generous legacy of Libraries’ friend Dorothy B. Smith. Mrs. Smith was a lifelong book lover who wanted to share her passion with others. The festival is free and just one of many university programs she and her family make possible.