Lee University’s annual Writers’ Festival will begin Jan. 21 with special guests Lauren Winner and Will Woolfitt. The two-day event, hosted by Lee’s Department of Language and Literature, will represent a range of creative writing genres. 

Author, historian, and lecturer Lauren Winner will read selections of her work on Monday, Jan. 21, at 7 p.m. in the Dixon Center. Dr. Winner is the author of “Girl Meets God,” “Mudhouse Sabbath,” and “Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity.” She will also speak at chapel in the Conn Center the following morning at 10:40. 

 Dr. Winner has appeared on PBS’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, Books and Culture, and Christianity Today.

Dr. Winner holds degrees from Duke, Columbia, and Cambridge Universities, as well as a doctorate in history.

Dr. Winner, who currently resides in Durham, N.C., teaches at Duke Divinity School and travels extensively to lecture and teach. She was a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University and the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University.

The newest faculty addition to Lee’s Department of Language & Literature, Dr. William Woolfitt, will read a selection of his short fiction on Tuesday, Jan. 22. The reading will start at 4 p.m. in the Edna Minor Conn Theatre (Vest Building).

Dr. Woolfitt was recently honored with a Pushcart Prize nomination and a “Best of the Net Nominations 2012.” He has been nominated for his poem, "Teresa of Avila Compares the Soul to a Palm Cabbage" and fiction piece, “Summer in Giverny.”

He is also the author of The Salvager’s Arts and co-winner of the 2011 Keystone Chapbook Prize through Seven Kitchens Press. The Keystone Chapbook Series focuses on the work of poets with Pennsylvania ties. 

Dr. Woolfitt’s work, "Red Coals,” was selected for publication in Best Indie Lit New England, Volume One, a forthcoming print anthology that will display the best fiction and poetry published by independent journals in New England from 2010 to 2012.

 

His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Michigan Quarterly Review, African American Review, Shenandoah, Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, Los Angeles Review, River Styx, Christianity and Literature, Sycamore Review, Southern Humanities Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, and The Christian Century. 

The Writers’ festival began with a precursory reading by Renaissance scholar and poet Brett Foster in November of 2012 as part of Sigma Tau Delta’s Literary Symposium. 

The Edna Minor Conn Theatre is located in Room 305 of the Vest Building, on the corner of Church and 11th Streets. 

The event is free and open to the public. For more information, call Dr. Kevin Brown at 614-8232 or email: kbrown@leeuniversity.edu.