Old Dominion University hosted the 47th Annual Literary Festival on Oct. 6-11, co-directed by ODU MFA Creative Writing faculty members Marianne Chan and John McManus. This year’s Lit Fest included 22 writers from across the country who read their work over 18 different events.
Readings took place in the University Theater, Chartway Arena, and Barry Art Museum. The opening reception was hosted at the Green Onion Restaurant, located on Colley Avenue. Every event was free and open to the public.
The theme of this year’s Literary Festival was “Ancient Futures,” where writers explored the past as means to inspire the future.
Unique interpretations of this prompt were shown through different forms of literature. ODU’s own Creative Writing MFA Director, Kent Wascom, read from his cyberpunk western novel, “The Great State of West Florida.”
Remica Bingham-Risher, another faculty member who has been published in The New York Times, The Writer’s Chronicle, and Essence, explored ancestry through her poetry collection, “Room Swept Home.” In it, Bingham-Risher tells the captivating story of her grandmothers and how closely connected the two women were.
On her maternal side, her grandmother was sent to the insane asylum in Petersburg for having postpartum depression in 1941. A mile away from that hospital lived Bingham-Risher’s paternal grandmother, who was enslaved until the age of six. These women were so close together, and upon discovering this, Bingham-Risher couldn’t help but imagine their paths crossing and reimagined this in “Room Swept Home,” the poetry collection read at this year’s Lit Fest.
Bingham-Risher’s readings captivated audiences as she partnered with Christal Brown, who performed interpretive dances on stage to the poems. In part of these dances, Brown used a scarf as a veil, a drape and curtain. Throughout five poems, Brown used movement to pass the evocation of ideas, while Bingham-Risher projected purposeful emotion in her voice.
Visual art accompanied a number of readings. Manuela Mourão displayed her paintings in the Baron & Ellin Gordon Art Galleries during her reading of “More Love Letters, Please.”
This year’s line up was filled with many award-winning faculty, alumni and visiting writers. Old Dominion’s own Luisa A. Igloria, the recipient of the twentieth annual Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia, is recognized widely for her poetry. Sigrid Nunez is an instant national bestselling author who won the National Book Award for “The Vulnerables.” Other decorations for the speakers include, but are not limited to, New York Times Best Seller, Pulitzer Prize Nominee, New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick, Puerto Del Sol Poetry Prize, CALQ’s Artist of the Year and the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez, a twice New York Times best-selling author and professor at American University, was the final reader. Perkins-Valdez has been awarded with the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, the Fiction Award from Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association.
Perkins-Valdez read sections of her most recent novel, “Take My Hand.” Throughout these readings, she also gave insight on how she wrote the book, a historical fiction novel set in 1973, which required thorough research.
Lit Fest emphasized the local community as well. Many of the writers featured at Lit Fest are Norfolk or Virginia locals. At the end of the readings, members of the audience were able to purchase the works read from popup tables of local bookstores, such as Eleanor’s Norfolk and Prince Books. This gave them the opportunity to to exchange a few words with the author and get their book signed.
The 47th Annual Literary Festival was a grand success, and those who had the pleasure of attending a reading were left feeling inspired and connected to literature and the past.
