Issue #8 (November 15, 2009)
Welcome to Festival News, the monthly e-mail newsletter of the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College. Our goal is to keep you updated on the latest news and happenings as we plan for Festival 2010 (April 15-17, 2010). We hope you find the information helpful.
1. Festival 2010 News and Updates
--Online registration for Festival 2010 (April 15-17, 2010) is now open. We're grateful that so many of you have already registered, and we're very much looking forward to welcoming you to Calvin in April. If you've not registered yet, you can do so through our online form. Answers to some of the most frequently asked registration questions are also available on our website. Please feel free to contact us at ffw@calvin.edu if we can assist you with your registration in any way.
--As you're looking ahead to Christmas, you might want to consider giving a Festival registration as a gift for the book lover or aspiring writer in your life. And the Fesitval office is more than happy to help you with that. E-mail us at ffw@calvin.edu for more information.
--Recent additions to the speaker roster for Festival 2010 include memoirist Rhoda Janzen and children's author Tonya Bolden. For more information on them—and on all the speakers who have been confirmed thus far--please visit our speakers page.
--We're happy to announce that novelist Wally Lamb will be the featured speaker at the Festival's evening plenary session on Thursday, April 15, 2010.
--The Festival's online manuscript submission program—which provides attendees with the opportunity to electronically submit a manuscript that can be accessed by editors attending the Festival—is undergoing some updates and changes, but it will be available to all Festival registrants sometime in early January. Look for more information in next month's Festival News.
2. Author News
--Mary Karr's new memoir, Lit, has just been released to widespread acclaim. The New York Times calls it "a memoir that explores the subjectivity of memory even as it chronicles with searching intelligence, humor, and grace the author's slow, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes painful discovery of her vocation and her voice as a poet and writer." The full New York Times review is available online. Karr talked about the book in a two-part interview with the Huffington Post last week.
--The November/December issue of Orion magazine features an essay by Scott Russell Sanders titled "Mind in the Forest," which is about his experience visiting the Andrews Forest in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon.
--Hope College professor and poet Rhoda Janzen has just published her first memoir, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, which tells the often-humorous story of her moving back home with her Mennonite parents after enduring a particularly difficult string of events. Janzen recently talked with Time magazine about the book.
--Rosing from the Dead is the title of Paul Willis's new book of poems, published by WordFarm. Visit WordFarm's website for more information about the book, including excerpts.
3. Website Updates
--We've recently posted a list of Festival speakers by genre. We hope you find it helpful.
--November's Festival Favorite is Gods in Alabama, a novel by Joshilyn Jackson. More information about the book—including an excerpt, reviews, and an interview—is available on our Festival Favorites page.
4. Links of Interest
--In 2008 the website Brown Bookshelf interviewed children's author Tonya Bolden about her childhood, her love of history, and her thoughts on writing for young readers.
--In a rare interview, novelist and memoirist John Edgar Wideman sat down with journalist Charlie Rose in 1996 to talk about writing, race, and Wideman's then-new book, The Cattle Killing. Watch a video of the interview.
--Calvin College's annual Symposium on Worship will take place on January 28-30, 2010, and will feature several speakers who may be of interest to Festival attendees, including Jeremy Begbie, Marva Dawn, Ed Gilbreath, and Richard Mouw. Visit the website for more information about the symposium.
5. Questions?
--If you have any questions about Festival 2010, please contact us by phone at 616.526.6770 or by e-mail at ffw@calvin.edu. We're happy to help.