The annual Windham Campbell Awards Literary Festival returns to campus Sept. 19-22 with a special series of events to commemorate its tenth anniversary, adding a keynote address by former American poet laureate Natasha Trethewey.
The 8 2022 award winners and several subsequent winners will travel to the festival campus to share their work, participate in debates on various topics, and celebrate reading and writing with the local community.
The full programme of lectures, debates and readings can be found on the Windham Campbell Awards website. All occasions are free and open to the public.
“There is no better way to commemorate the ordinary 10 years of awards and literary achievements of each winner than to come together to the first in-person festival since 2019,” said Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham Campbell Awards. are proud to welcome the elegance of 2022, as well as many of last year’s winners, to Yale this fall to celebrate their talent. “
The 2022 winners, on March 29, are in fiction, Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe) and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu (Zimbabwe); in non-fiction, Margo Jefferson (United States) and Emmanuel Iduma (Nigeria); in theatre, Winsome Pinnock (UNITED Kingdom) and Sharon Bridgforth (United States); and in poetry, Wong May (Ireland/Singapore/China) and Zaffar Kunial (United Kingdom).
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Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival was cancelled in 2020 and became an online exhibition last year.
On Monday, Sept. 19 at five p. m. , Yale President Peter Salovey will present the awards in an award rite in the Robert L Conference Room. McNeil, Jr. of the Yale University Art Gallery. Trethewey, who served back-to-back terms as the country’s Poet Laureate in 2012 and 2013, will give a keynote lecture on the topic “Why I Write. “The occasion will be broadcast live.
The festival kicks off at 10 a. m. Tuesday morning in a tent on Cross Campus with a “Daily Wake Up” consultation that includes loose coffee and treats, books and handbags, and a short read from playwright and 2020 award winner Aleshea Harris. Daily Revival consultations Wednesday and Thursday will come with readings through poet and 2019 laureate Ishion Hutchinson and poet and laureate. 2020 Jonah Mixon-Webster.
Tuesday’s events will come with a career-boosting verbal exchange between novelist and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga and Courtney J. Martin, director Paul Mellon of the Yale Center for British Art, about the impact of the award-winning novels on women’s writing in Africa. and around the world. globe; a choral performance of “Intimate Strangers,” a collaboration between Portuguese singer and songwriter Sara Serpa and Nigerian publisher Emmanuel Iduma, encouraged through Iduma’s book, “A Stranger’s Pose”; and an intimate examination of the papers of poet Langston Hughes, conducted at the Beinecke Library, with editor Sharon Bridgforth.
Wednesday’s highlight will come with a discussion through critic Margo Jefferson about how non-public narrative is a component of criticism, and vice versa; a verbal exchange on the stories surrounding “migration children,” with Yale researcher Alicia Schmidt Camacho, poet Zaffar Kunial, and playwrights Winsome Pinnock and Sharon Bridgforth; and Mixon-Webster will speak with Lisa Monroe, assignment manager at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center, to read about the history of slavery in the United States and how the afterlife lurks in the present.
Thursday’s events come with a discussion between Pinnock and 2016 award-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins about JMW’s legacy and history. Turner’s “The Slave Ship,” which is at the center of Pinnock’s latest work; a discussion through filmmaker and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu about the long history of artists covering Zimbabwean music and about musician Louis Armstrong’s tours of the African continent in the 1950s and 1960s; and a verbal exchange between Iduma and Cajetan Iheka, an English teacher at Yale, focused on the profound wisdom of the winner’s African photography.
In a welcome return to tradition, the 2022 award winners will offer brief readings of their paintings at the festival’s final event, which will take place on Thursday at 7:30 p. m. m. in the convention hall of the Yale University Art Gallery.
Members of the public at all times should be ready to provide evidence of COVID-19 vaccination. Masks will be required in most cases indoors.
For a full calendar of events, visit the Windham Campbell Award website.
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