Get Lit! Festival 2022

Join us via YouTube for a free reading and conversation with writers Sayantani Dasgupta and Rajiv Mohabir. Dasgupta, the author of the short story collection Women Who Misbehave, and Mohabir, author of Antiman, a poetic memoir, use their own experiences and the experiences of their characters to approach questions of cultural heritage, sexuality, and identity. Both writers will share their work and engage in a conversation about using their work to redefine roles and boundaries typically put around women, immigrants, and other underrepresented groups.

Click here to view this event on Facebook, and click here to purchase this event's book(s) from Auntie’s. Please help us by filling out a festival survey!

*Virtual events listed on our schedule will be available to watch at their scheduled time, and will remain available to watch on our YouTube channel indefinitely. 

Join us on YouTube for a free reading celebrating two talented local writers and Eastern Washington University alums who have books recently published or forthcoming in 2022. Kacy Tellessen is a Marine Corps veteran whose memoir Freaks of a Feather looks at Tellessen’s experience serving in Iraq in two tours from 2005-2009. He explores the stark contrast of the expectation of war and serving one's country versus the reality of war and the toll it takes on a soldier’s mental health. Since the publication of Leyna Krow’s collection I’m Fine But You Appear To Be Sinking, her stories have gained critical acclaim and one story, "Sinkhole," will soon be adapted for the screen. Krow’s first novel Fire Season (coming this summer from Viking) tells the story of three scheming opportunists whose lives collide in the wake of a devastating fire in Spokane Falls in 1889.  Fire Season freshly imagines the greed and misogyny of the American West to tell a rollicking, bewitching story about finding purpose in the face of injustice. Both Leyna Krow and Kacy Tellessen are alumni of Eastern Washington University, and they will answer a few questions about their experience at EWU and how it shaped their writing careers.

Click here to view this event on Facebook, and click here to purchase this event's book(s) from Auntie’s. Please help us by filling out a festival survey! 

Join us for this free event via YouTube for a talk about writing sex scenes, one of the most difficult challenges an author faces. The panel will feature five debut authors whose novels were published in 2020. Amanda Brainerd, the author of Age of Consent (nominated for "Best Sex Scene" by the Zibby Awards) will moderate the conversation with Leah Konen, the author of All the Broken People, Ellen Birkett Morris, the author of Lost Girls, Liv Arnold, the author of erotic rom com Stepping Stone, and Eliza Nellums, the author of All That’s Bright and Gone. The panel will discuss the awkward, fun, strange, and basic part of being human that sex is, and how to capture its awkwardness, pleasure, and sexiness in a believable manner. This will include short readings as well as topics such as the struggles of writing a sex scene, character interaction, whether sex scenes should be “hot”, and what should be omitted. All of these wonderful authors will bring fresh perspective to a typically off-limits topic.

Click here to view this event on Facebook.

*Note that virtual events listed on our schedule will be available to watch at their scheduled time, and will remain available to watch on our YouTube channel indefinitely.

Please help us by filling out a festival survey! 

Join us via YouTube for the free event “Split/Lip Press Presents: Why We Depart: Genre Bending Across Nonfiction Lines” with Lauren W. Westerfield, Athena Dixon, Calvin Walds, and Jeannine Ouellete as they use their experiences to delve into why genre-bending motivates, fascinates, and continues to grow, opening the conversation around nonfiction with continued examination of the tools we as writers have at our disposal.

*Note that virtual events listed on our schedule will be available to watch at their scheduled time, and will remain available to watch on our YouTube channel indefinitely.

Click here to view this event on Facebook. Please help us by filling out a festival survey! 

Join us for this free event via YouTube to celebrate new poetry by the women of Empty Bowl Press, Holly J. Hughes, Shin Yu Pai, and Ann Spiers. Their poems define what is fragile, threatened, and all in all, widely spiritual in our natural environment. Shin Yu Pai’s Virga offers Buddhist thought from lived experience; Ann Spiers’ Rain Violent captures climate crisis in quatrains linked with weather symbols; and Holly J. Hughes’ Hold Fast celebrates the “ten thousand sorrows and ten thousand joys” she invites us all to hold fast. Empty Bowl Press’s mission is to publish writers dedicated to the love and preservation of human communities in wild places. As poets of Empty Bowl Press, they believe the climate crisis affects all living beings…people, animals, plants, natural systems. They find it urgent as poets to join other writers at Get Lit! to speak about these effects.

Click here to view this event on Facebook, and click here to purchase this event's book(s) from Auntie’s. Please help us by filling out a festival survey!

Join us via YouTube for this free event where we welcome Alda P. Dobbs, Daniel Aleman, Payal Doshi, Margarita Longoria, and Maria E. Andreu for a virtual reading and conversation on border and immigrant perspectives in writing for children. These authors will all share stories aimed to expand and enrich young readers' views of the world and of themselves while creating empathy and showing how similar we all are in spite of our origins, our histories, and our cultural backgrounds. They will also share ideas for incorporating these books into lessons on teaching immigration, life near the U.S.-Mexico border, and cultures outside the U.S.

*Note that virtual events listed on our schedule will be available to watch at their scheduled time, and will remain available to watch on our YouTube channel indefinitely.

Click here to view this event via Facebook, and click here to purchase this event's book(s) from Auntie’s. Please help us by filling out a festival survey! 

Join us on YouTube for this year’s Regional MFA Reading, an event that has been a festival mainstay for many years! This format has allowed us to present a robust lineup of readers from 7 MFA programs across Washington, Idaho, and Oregon. Each school has sent us one MFA candidate to read their work, and students will be introduced by a creative writing faculty member. We are excited that this format will allow us to get to know students and faculty members from so many different programs—we hope you’ll join us to hear from this region’s rising writing talents!

*This event will be free and available to watch on our YouTube channel. Link coming soon.

Click here to view this event via Facebook. Please help us by filling out a festival survey!